Intelligent video analytics deals with automatically processing and monitoring the information derived from the video frames along with taking necessary actions. Video analytics solutions have seen exponential growth lately, mainly because of their ability to provide invaluable business insights along with adding an additional layer of security. The global video analytics is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 18% during 2020-2025.

Video analytics works mainly in two categories: Post-processing and real-time processing.

• Post-Processing: In this case, videos are stored and processed afterwards. It can’t be used for deriving real-time insights. The hardware and software requirements are also modest.
• Real-Time Processing: In this case, video analytics is done on live videos to draw insights and display or store them in real-time. Adding real-time processing capability is more complex as compared to post-processing. The hardware and software stack also needs to be a bit more sophisticated in order to meet the latency requirements typically associated with these type of solutions

Use Cases

Video Analytics For Security

Intelligent surveillance systems are mostly installed to make a place more secure. The global video surveillance market was valued at $42.94 Bn in 2019 and is projected to reach $144.85 Bn in 2027. There are tons of security use cases across industries like intruder detection, detecting harmful objects such as guns, recognizing suspicious activities such as violence, shoplifting, etc. The biggest reason behind the success of such systems is the autonomy associated with it.

There is no human in the loop, the system is capable of detecting a suspicious action or activity and generating an alarm using just a few IoT sensors. Most of the smart cameras these days are pre-loaded with programs and AI capability that can solve common business problems like counting the number of people present in the frame, detecting violence in a video, etc. This complete packaging has made video analytics solutions a must-have for most industries.

Video Analytics For Drawing Business Insights

Another major advantage of video analytics solutions is that it can provide invaluable data regarding the day to day workings of an organization. There are cameras in virtually every organization, and video analytics solutions leverage this existing infrastructure and build on top of it. As cameras never sleep they capture useful information that is free of biases and errors and can be used to derive business insights which in turn can be used to maximize the profits and enhance the customer experience which in turn leads to an increase in customer NPS.

The most common use case is retail store analytics. It can be used to extract information such as the number of people that visited the store, age, demographic, popularity of a product, etc.

Video Analytics For Process Compliance

Video Analytics also plays a major role in monitoring SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) within an organization. There are various government organizations in India and abroad which monitor the compliance and SOP adherence of different companies. The cost of non-compliance comes up to be about 2.65x of the cost of compliance. When business operations are monitored with the help of video analytics it leads to near accurate adherence to compliance and drastically reduces the possibility and the risk of non-compliance faced by these companies.

There are various applications of video analytics in different sectors such as manufacturing, hospitality, pharma, etc. To name a few safety gears could be detected for manufacturing industries, whereas kitchen hygiene could be detected for restaurants and hotels.

Monitoring the adherence of these SOPs was tedious before the arrival of intelligent video analytics Solutions as the process used to be manual which led to human bias and errors. An operator would miss up to 45% of screen activity after 12 minutes of continuous video monitoring. This would go up to 95% after 22 minutes of viewing. Now, with the advent of video analytics, it is feasible to monitor any process compliance as it reduces the possibility of human errors and biases drastically.

The Intersection of 5G And AI

The arrival of 5G will transform the video surveillance industry by solving the core problems associated with this field. The perpetual issues of bandwidth and latency can finally be solved by integrating 5G in the video and Data Analytics system. 5G allows us to send high-quality videos (1080p, 4K) over the network as it provides a high video transmission bandwidth.

This will, in turn, reduce the latency associated with video transmission and video processing.

Another important aspect associated with 5G is its ability to integrate billions of IoT devices. The integration of IoT devices in the video and Data Analytics pipeline will provide us with massive amounts of data that we can leverage to draw actionable insights.

The compute capability of modern devices is also increasing at an exponential rate which has allowed us to create more sophisticated AI algorithms. So, by integrating the increased computing capability of new-age devices, high video transmission bandwidth provided by 5G, and the omnipresent IoT devices we can create an extremely efficient and robust video and data analytics system.

How 5G Will Help Wobot’s Operations

As the world gains momentum again, following hygiene guidelines would become necessary. It would become the new normal for businesses and organizations in India and worldwide to follow these guidelines. For an organization physical monitoring of their business operations would not be effective and scalable beyond a point. With the enablement of 5G, Wobot would be able to provide these businesses with 24×7 monitoring with real-time notifications, and insights on the cloud.

With the arrival of 5G transferring the feed from the customer’s location to the cloud would become extremely fast and efficient. This would take the load off business owners and heads of locations or teams in ensuring compliance and improving sanitization in their premises on a real-time basis. This, in turn, would ensure the well-being of their employees while bringing down the cost of compliance significantly.

Future Opportunities

Intelligent video analytics is still a growing field and it is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. There are a lot of new technologies that can be integrated with video analytics in the future to increase the robustness and efficiency of the solutions, some of them are augmented reality (AR) and cybersecurity.

Future opportunities in this space will rely on the intersection of these technologies. With the increasing concern over data security, it is paramount to integrate cybersecurity with video analytics to enhance data security. Augmented reality, in integration with video analytics, can be used in various enterprises for demonstrations, it can be used to give instructions in real-time to people working in the field and analyze their performance.

Conclusion

The intelligent video analytics industry will continue to boom in the coming years, with more and more organizations looking to adopt it. We have already seen an immense rise in the adoption of video analytics solutions, from retail analytics and process compliance to self-driving cars, it is gradually covering every aspect of our lives.

Many organizations would look to move to remote monitoring post-Covid-19 and the continuous and fast-paced advancements in this sector will only help in making intelligent video analytics ubiquitous and a welcome move in such times.