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Video Surveillance Systems: Reality TV

The reasons to invest in new video surveillance systems are everywhere. Zoom in on these six insights to help you focus on what's important and what's just hype.

As digital video quality improves, training rapidly gains purchase as a prime application. Ramos uses his new system to train cashiers and other store-level associates. Captured images of employees doing something well are posted as a method of positive reinforcement, and captured images of common mistakes get tacked up too, as an awareness tool.

In retail industries, especially, marketing wants in on video surveillance. Consultant Jones is working with retailers to map store traffic to improve the flow of customers and increase safety. Others are using the visual data to watch inventory levels.

Companies are cutting travel expenses by using the infrastructure for meetings. Or using it for OSHA-like inspections of restaurants, allowing more inspections with less travel dollars spent. Genzyme's Kent uses video for quality control by monitoring production trains.

A public utility uses cameras to validate trespassing incidents. Police issue tickets and revenue increases. At the same time, costs incurred by the court system fall, because perpetrators don't challenge the visual evidence.

A major transit authority watches its stations, measures footfall and traffic patterns, reconfigures stations to reduce congestion, adjusts train schedules based on the visual data, locates common loitering spots and makes them less loiterer-friendly. All of the following increase: safety, ridership and revenue.

A humpyard, where train cars come off boats and trucks and are assembled into trains, repurposes its video surveillance. Now managers not only watch fence lines for trespassers and would-be thieves, but they manage the logistics of assembling the trains correctly and getting them, literally, on the right tracka job that used to involve several men in towers talking to each other and people on the ground as they looked out over their vast yards with binoculars.

These applications are real. More are coming, and they are limited only by the imagination. Digital video surveillance on IP networks will take over. For better and for worse, this camera craze will flourish and develop into a surveillance nation. And then there will be a simple, precise answer to the question, What are you looking at?

Everything, all the time.