Intelligent Video Surveillance Requires the Right Tools
The 1080p and 4K UHD cameras that schools now deploy can show detail from much greater distances than lesser cameras that once were the standard.
“You have cameras that provide context, so they cover a very wide amount of space, like an entire street. Then you need cameras that are much more zoomed in, or have very close views of people or objects,” says Bentinck. He cites a metric of 40 pixels per foot as the standard for being able to see details like a person’s face or a car’s license plate. The higher the resolution a camera can record, the further away it can be to achieve that kind of detail.
Such detail allows campus security to use camera analytics. For instance, Georgia Southern University implemented an intelligent video surveillance system earlier this year that records the license plate numbers of every car going into a parking lot belonging to the institution. It also allows security personnel to search details such car make and model, plate number and state, and whether the car has a temporary tag or even no tag at all.
Bentinck shares how such footage might be used: “Let’s say someone said, ‘I have a dent in the back of my truck. I think someone reversed into me and drove off.’ Security can search video of the area where the truck was and then start filtering down the number of events. They can say, ‘I only want video returned that has people or people with vehicles,’ and now suddenly you’ve gone from thousands of events to hundreds of events to tens of events.”
Using Cisco’s application programming interfaces, third-party applications could make the search even more granular, filtering by form factor (truck versus car), color or license plate number.
In other cases, video analytics can show where crowds gather and establish foot traffic patterns. For campuses, this usually comes into play with large gatherings, but Bentinck cited a customer that wanted to learn about traffic flow in the library.
“The primary purchasing decision is that they’re buying it for security,” he says about why his customers buy the camera systems. “But during the evaluation process, the fact that these other things are possible is very interesting to them and shows how this could be used for more things that could add value.”