THREE FUNDAMENTALS OF CCTV - EVERYTHING ELSE IS PERIPHERAL

The Proliferation of Surveillance Devices

In today’s world, surveillance cameras are everywhere. From CCTV to Drones, UAVs, Body-Worn, Dashcams, and more, the proliferation of surveillance devices has led to an explosion of video data. Despite this increase in information, issues ranging from crime to compliance continue to occur globally.

The Unseen Footage

The surveillance industry and users accept the fact that over 95% of the footage is never seen. This, in our opinion, is due to two reasons:

1. There is no way (no tool) to see so much data.
2. Users feel that because nothing has gone ‘wrong’, things are fine. So, there is an ‘assumption’ mode, instead of an ‘assured’ mode.

The Evolution of Automated Technologies

With the advancement of the surveillance industry, many companies earlier worked on video analytics and such automated alert-based systems. Their lifespan was close to 25 years or so. Now, there is the glitz of AI, ML, DL, and so on; and everyone, including the industry, feels that these glittering technologies are the panacea to solve the problem of video surveillance and information overload by themselves. But this is far from the truth.

The basic problem is that any automated technology can only do what it is has been programmed for. What about the rest? What about the unknown and the unexpected? Also, even if the results of these expensive technologies are true, who has to see them and escalate them? The HUMAN!

AUDIT - See What the Cameras Saw!

Since the human angle cannot be taken away, why not give the human the ability to AUDIT the entire day’s footage, and the right tool to do this? And COM-SUR is that right tool, which will allow the user to audit 24 hours of footage depicting multiple cameras in minutes! That allows them to see the 'entire picture' as opposed to just the 'shorts'.

SMART BACKUP

Another ignored issue is the angle of video data management. With the craze of more and more megapixels comes more storage requirements. Even with compression ratios like H.265, there is still a problem of storage, and of course bandwidth issues when users want to store video in the cloud. Add the fact that the industry has no scientific reason as to why people store video for 15, 30, 60, 90, 180, days and so on… after which the data gets overwritten thereby losing out on rich visual information that the cameras would have seen, but no action was taken!?????

Therefore, there must be a way to reduce the data size smartly, over and above the compression, at the same time ensuring that there isn’t any critical loss of information, Doing so not only solves the bandwidth problem, but also guarantees that even if the recorder is compromised, the data will always be available. Again, there must be a way for users to create an institutional library of important findings that are well categorized and can be searched after YEARS to come! Again, COM-SUR is the answer to do all of the above.

STANDARDIZED INCIDENT REPORTING

Finally, despite the fact that incidents do not differ by geography, the industry has not addressed the angle of standardized incident reporting which COM-SUR creates in PowerPoint in intelligent templates answering the 5Ws (what when where why who) and 1 H (how). COM-SUR also embeds the relevant video in the deck automatically thereby helping to take quicker action. Again, since the template is standardized, it is like “everyone speaks the same language”. The icing is that the metadata that is collected by this template starts delivering data analytics.

Conclusion

While newer technologies will evolve, AUDITING, SMART BACKUP, and STANDARDIZED INTELLIGENT INCIDENT REPORTING are FUNDAMENTAL, and the ONLY solution that does all this almost magically is COM-SUR.

Think of COM-SUR like the MS Office of CCTV!

?

?