Surveillance is the act of observing something. Many modern technologies facilitate surveillance, including video cameras and the interception of electronic communications.
The use of surveillance is a controversial topic, with many privacy activists and civil liberties groups opposing it. Nevertheless, it is an increasingly common feature of our society.
Tag and Track Video Surveillance
Whether you’re looking to monitor your employees or expensive equipment, video surveillance can keep you informed and aware of what happens when you’re not there. Choosing the right video surveillance technology depends on four key things.
As a business owner, it’s your job to protect your employees, property and customers. Unfortunately, locking the doors alone is often not enough.
Fortunately, technologies like smart cameras can help to safeguard your property. In addition to capturing footage, they can detect unusual activity and alert first responders. This technology is especially valuable in places where security is limited, such as schools and hospitals.
By tagging an individual or vehicle with visual identifiers, you can track their movements within your surveillance network. Then, when they appear again in your footage, you can instantly see where they were previously and the path they took before their appearance. This software enables businesses to dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend researching incidents.
Many video surveillance systems rely on RFID, GPS or other tracking capabilities to manage assets. This includes expensive equipment, fleet vehicles and even at-risk patients. This allows you to monitor their movement and location, and even overlay data like street names and compass points over live video. It also helps you to quickly find the footage you need in the event of an emergency.
Smart People Tracking Solutions
Using people tracking technology to automatically identify persons in surveillance footage enables more effective crime prevention and search capabilities. This solution is an alternative to manually retrieving and analyzing security videos, which often incurs substantial labor cost and is not capable of providing real-time alerts for suspicious behavior or missing persons.
It works by applying person attribute recognition and characterization features to the captured images and comparing them against pre-existing data sets of known persons. This enables the system to filter for conditions such as gender, age, clothing and accessories, which improves the recognition rate of tracking people trajectories.
In addition, a smart people tracking solution can also track objects and equipment to ensure that they are delivered in the correct locations and under the required environmental conditions. This can help companies avoid wasting time and resources by ensuring that materials, goods and products reach their destinations in the right conditions.
Smart people tracking solutions can also help businesses improve their safety measures by reducing the spread of illness, optimizing evacuation procedures and conducting efficient muster in case of an emergency event. These features can contribute to a safe and secure work environment for employees and customers alike, which in turn can boost customer satisfaction and business growth.
Inverse Surveillance
As the technologies that enable sousveillance become more powerful, it becomes easier to record activities from below, and the concept of inverse surveillance is becoming more prevalent. For example, the Rodney King video was recorded by a passerby on a mobile phone, rather than a security camera. This more personal approach is often referred to as “personal sousveillance,” and it has the potential to undermine the power of a hierarchical system of surveillance by allowing ordinary people to record their own interactions with authority figures, whether it’s citizens photographing police, shoppers recording shop owners, or cab passengers filming their drivers.
One of the benefits of this form of sousveillance is that it enables individuals to signal their concerns more effectively than would be possible with traditional methods. For example, a mobile phone that records a person’s encounter with a police officer can easily be sent to an activist group. Inverse surveillance also has the potential to make it harder for authorities to ignore abuses of power, since filmed abusive behavior is more likely to be punished when widely broadcast.
However, as Steve Mann, Joi Ito, and Brian Wellman have pointed out, this form of surveillance can also be counterproductive. Instead of reshaping power relations, it can create a feedback loop in which everyone monitors each other, and the result is a kind of participatory panopticon that is more like an annoying neighbor than a helpful community watch.
Video Analytics
Video analytics works to automatically detect patterns and events that are often difficult for humans to keep track of. These alerts are delivered in real-time to authorized users and can trigger certain processes or actions.
These automated alerts are one of the main benefits of surveillance solutions that deploy video analytics algorithms. It frees up security staff from having to constantly monitor live video footage, reduces the chances of human error, and enables a more rapid response to incidents.
Besides being a powerful security tool, video analytics can be used to collect valuable business intelligence for a variety of business uses. Retailers, for instance, utilize it to understand their customers’ body language, walking patterns, and visit duration to optimize store layouts and service delivery.
In healthcare, it can help guard against theft of drugs and equipment and to improve patient and visitor experience. It can also be applied to a warehouse or logistics setting to monitor the movement of inventory and assets, to ensure that items are placed in their correct storage locations.
Regardless of the industry, leveraging video analytics can greatly boost a company’s operational efficiency. This data can be analyzed to establish customer demographics and identify trends in purchasing behavior, to help businesses make informed decisions that will lead to improved profitability. Businesses can also use it to improve internal operations by monitoring employee performance, identifying bottlenecks and other inhibitors, and redirecting resources where they are most needed.