Intelligent video analytics: The power to predict

Today, the power of AI-driven predictive and video analytics has broken new grounds with the emergence of IoT. The ability to observe and analyse past events and human behaviour enables us to proactively respond to unfolding scenarios, anticipate actions, and prepare adequate responses. This makes it possible to bring in solutions across different scenarios – from leads translating to sales for businesses to smart city management and other aspects. 

Our world, especially the urban regions, public spaces and workplaces are increasingly becoming monitored by CCTV surveillance. Initially perceived as a measure to document the ongoing activities in a space under observation, CCTVs are now being integrated with AI, analytics and IoT to make them more impactful and beneficial. In the normal course of operations, CCTV camera systems merely relay the visuals to the control room where they may/may not be stored on a hard disk. This kind of streaming doesn’t really provide any kind of inputs, insights or action prompts. However, an intelligent video analytics system not only sees the visuals, but is also able to identify patterns, objects and outcomes through various AI-defined parameters. It is able to turn raw video data into segregated and actionable inputs which are then used by predictive analytics technologies to understand and define trends and patterns that lead to specific outcomes. Thus, through contextual analytics of video feed serves as the platform that helps organizations use historical data to predict future events. Subsequently, they can plan their actions and proactively prevent unforeseen incidents or outcomes. 

Video-AI based predictive analytics platforms can improve security and safety measures and also give CCTVs the ability to do things which are outside of the purview of security and surveillance. As an integrated platform, they can become smart sensors that offer information on actions or condition of people and objects within the area observed by them. Such data-driven solutions are able to add value to organizational efficiency, customer satisfaction or revenue generation depending on the use cases. 

As stated, this merger of video analytics and predictive analytics opens up great vistas of usage in almost every major walk of life such as:

Law and order handling: Today, video-AI solutions can run scans to match faces of a suspected person with the criminal data base and when defined by emotion-based parameters, they can identify if a person is agitated, happy, sad or relaxed. Vehicle type, colour, registration number, speed and direction etc can be analysed by a smart CCTV solution. The data qualified by such video-AI systems can be used by law-and-order agencies to run predictive analytics and identify crime patterns etc. Even if the technology doesn’t create a 100% fool-proof crime prevention system, it can help the agencies predict the likelihood of crime taking place and strengthen their security deployments and response time. 

Commercial and public buildings – For instance, an AI integrated camera would raise an alert if it detects any kind of crowding or violation of specified behavioural norms such as a vehicle blocking entry or exit to the parking lot or smoke/sparks emanating from an electrical system and so on. 

Retail outlets – Video-AI cameras can count footfall, document average time spent by customers in the shop or in a specific aisle. It can identify peak hours, demand time for product types and also create other inputs that help store managers understand customer behaviour and provide better services as well as experience. On a larger scale, decision makers can understand which products sell faster and replenish them sooner. They can also make the products with lower sales more visible. Sometimes, a product on the lowest shelf remains unnoticed and video AI tools can help in identifying such occurrences. For instance, when the video AI system provides the input that products sell 30% faster on weekends and in evenings compared to weekdays, the predictive analytics system can reorganize the stock replenishment process to ensure additional stock availability on the weekends compared to a weekday. 

Traffic management – A smart CCTV system would monitor and analyse vehicular behaviour on the roads. It can identify wrong side driving, dangerous driving or vehicles loitering on busy roads. It can communicate with other smart IoT enabled vehicles and regulate the movement of vehicles and pedestrians. A smart camera is capable of differentiating between cars, bicycles, trucks and pedestrians and can calculate factors such as speed and trajectory to determine whether someone is driving dangerously. 

There is no doubt that video-AI powered predictive will grow all over the world. With increased awareness and competitive product offerings, more and more businesses, government authorities, urban management and transportation organizations etc., will adopt the technology. Such predictive analytics solutions are futuristic, reliable, accurate and fast enough to empower users with the ability to predict the future and respond to it with better effectiveness. 

The article has been written by Abhijit Shanbhag, President and CEO, Graymatics