Industry View

5 Musts for Advancing Video Surveillance in Security

As the use and sophistication of video surveillance systems grows, more CSOs are finding it is necessary to integrate video into overall IT security. Eric Eaton, CTO of BRS Labs, gives us the top five criteria to consider when evaluating a video surveillance solution

By Eric Eaton, CTO, BRS Labs

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Scalability Is Key to Success

A video analytics technology capable of learning relies on computing power, which requires organizations to ensure that all elements of the system have the potential to scale to meet the needs of even larger video surveillance operations. Scalability is crucial; the sheer amount of video surveillance now being deployed is staggering. In London, there was an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras in June 2007.

Manual operations are expensive and limit the effective scalability of the system; if the video surveillance system cannot scale, the set up could require the hand calibration of each camera when it is set up and hand tuning to define security zones. Scalable systems will allow the video surveillance system to add cameras and video fields over time so that as an organization grows, its video surveillance system will grow with it. Over time, organizations expanding their video surveillance deployments over large areas will look to solutions that can self-calibrate rather than require manual programming. Organizations deploying video surveillance will also need an enterprise-class architecture that can scale in order to manage all the hardware and servers necessary to analyze the video.

Vendors can multiplex all the digitized video streams coming from the cameras into a video concentrator device or onto network video storage. Most of these solutions provide some recording capability and centralization of control to limit the total electronic real estate used by the video surveillance deployment.

Compatibility for Multiple Video Technologies

But once the video streams are concentrated or stored, what happens next? A level of compatibility is required if the video analytics solutions need to transmit video streams to an analytic engine so that different types of applications can consume and process the video. The more scalable video surveillance systems embrace open non-proprietary video standards, using network protocols such as Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), so that they can publish the video to as many people as possible.

Getting the video stream into an open standard for distribution can be a problem. Every camera manufacturer has a proprietary format or protocol for moving data. This did not matter with traditional closed-video surveillance systems, because only one vendor was needed for the entire solution. With analytics-based solutions emerging today, this requires a move to more open systems that will enable IT to select best of breed analysis technologies, and perhaps to run analysis technologies from a variety of vendors in order to meet their growing requirements. The video processing equipment must be compatible with the video viewing and video storage equipment. Without proper planning, this can result in duplicate purpose equipment, in which it is necessary to buy open-standards video processing equipment that runs in parallel with proprietary equipment.