It’s well documented that effectively monitoring security cameras is difficult. Human operators routinely suffer from fatigue and lack of focus even after short periods of time resulting in missed events. Even with increased manpower, the problems persist. As a result, video surveillance systems have largely become forensic tools – helping organisations reconstruct an incident after it has occurred instead of preventing the incident from occurring – until now.

In the past several years the security industry has seen the emergence of remote video guarding in the mainstream, helping transform video surveillance systems into proactive tools to help prevent incidents. While many names have been used to describe this service, it’s important to understand how it’s different than traditional video guard tours and video escorts. Remote guarding is event driven, relying on video analytic technology to notify a remote operator when a specific event has occurred (e.g. trespassing, loitering, crowd formation) instead of a schedule based periodic set of observations similar to video guard tours. Event driven systems are far more likely to catch the threat in real-time– bringing attention to the right place at the right time.

With the emergence of remote guarding, small and medium businesses now have access to guard level security at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, remote guarding can actually improve overall security. So the result – better security at lower cost, regardless of the size of the company.

What has changed over the past few years that has led to remote guarding’s emergence in the mainstream? How is technology helping and what are the benefits to end-users, integrators and monitoring companies?

What Has Changed?

Extensive installation and maintenance costs along with an unpredictable false alarm rate have historically made video analytics a tool for only the largest and most advanced organizations. And while video analytics have been used to augment on-site guard forces and internal command centers, the high number of false alarms has prevented remote guarding stations from using it cost effectively – until now.

The introduction of advanced, adaptive analytics has dramatically reduced the false alarm rate, making it possible for remote guarding companies to cost effectively scale their operations. And by eliminating calibration, adaptive analytic systems are now as easy to install and maintain as traditional, unintelligent systems without analytics. This eliminates another critical barrier for many mainstream customers – extensive installation and maintenance labour costs.

What Are Adaptive Analytics?

Adaptive analytics uniquely identify people, vehicles and boats by comparing multiple characteristics of an object’s appearance (texture, silhouette, unique visual features etc.) with representations synthesized from a database of hundreds of thousands of examples of people, vehicles and boats in motion and in all weather and lighting conditions. By focusing on objects and classifying them on multiple characteristics, adaptive analytics dramatically reduce system false alarm rates, allowing remote guarding companies to efficiently scale their operations. Adaptive analytics also eliminate the need to ever calibrate the system, in many cases making them as affordable as an unintelligent system without analytics, saving end-users and integrators significant time, money and resources.

VideoIQ is the inventor of one the best performing, yet simplest, proactive surveillance systems. Their award-winning adaptive analytics, offer a suite of powerful, all-in-one systems that deliver superior accuracy, maximum range and self-calibration. The result is powerful, real-time threat detection and video evidence that is cost effective, easy to install, use and manage.  These products are now available in the UK through selected suppliers.