Now that the New Year has begun, most video surveillance vendors have offered their insights into what will be the prevailing trends in 2017. Taking a look at these trends, we can see that they reflect a generate desire by the vendors to offer more value to users amid harsher competition in the industry.
Now that the New Year has begun, most video surveillance vendors have offered their insights into what will be the prevailing trends in 2017. Taking a look at these trends, we can see that they reflect a generate desire by the vendors to offer more value to users amid harsher competition in the industry.
The video surveillance landscape looks pretty different now than it did a few years ago. While the demand is still there, growth has slowed by a significant margin. A recent report by Memoori cited video surveillance growth registered at a mere 4.2 percent in 2016. In particular, it noted Chinese competitors’ efforts to “make very drastic reductions to their prices across world markets.”
Amid Chinese vendors’ aggression, most Western, more well-established security players said that they would not get involved in a race to the bottom. Rather, they are more inclined to investing in new technologies and solutions, combined with sophisticated data analytics software, to help end users achieve better TCO, ROI and business intelligence. Some of the trends they identified, as cited below, basically follow this trajectory of giving more value to users.
Managed service
Video surveillance as a service will gain further popularity this year due to its various benefits, including reduced upfront cost and further protection against cyber threats. “We think end users will start to see their security as a service – remote hosting and monitoring of video transmitted from the customer’s premise, whether by themselves or more likely by sector-specific specialists who can not only take away the burden of managing the complex systems involved, but also reduce the costs of keeping those systems up to date and secure,” said Johan Paulsson, CTO of
Axis Communications. “This will not only free up internal resources which could be better focused elsewhere, but also improve the service level of the security system, enable better device management, and strengthen cybersecurity processes.”
Advanced compression
While H.264 is still the mainstream, H.265 may gain more acceptance. “H.265 will be more accepted in the coming months and years. We are … upgrading the majority of our portfolio to H.265 as of April and May. Our next generation will offer bitrate savings, keeping data manageable as well as storage requirements and network strain to a minimum, of up to 80 percent by combining smart encoding, Intelligent Dynamic Noise Reduction and H.265,” said Pieter van de Looveren, Senior Manager of Marketing Communication at
Bosch Security Systems.
IDIS, meanwhile, is offering a hybrid codec solution that helps ease the transition from H.264 to H.265. “In our solution, you can do live monitoring in H.264 and record in H.265. So, get the benefits of both worlds,” said Peter Kim, Senior Director at
IDIS. “You don't have to upgrade your CPU or PC. The live stream is in H.264, but we give end users the benefit of savings data retention, because you can record in H.265.”
IoT/big data
Analyzing and finding the hidden value in video data to meet security and other business objectives will be important this year and the years moving forward. “Today research already shows that video data is mainly used in an emergency or after a criminal act. This happens according to statistics less than 10 percent of the time. Therefore together with our customers we need to start thinking about how to re-purpose this video data and start to use 100 percent of the data captured,” said Looveren, Senior Manager of Marketing Communication at Bosch Security Systems. “We recognize this trend and that is the reason that we equip all our network video cameras with built-in video analytics as a standard as of our IP 4000 series.”
Deep learning
For a long time, video analytics has suffered accuracy and reliability issues, failing to live up to their expectations. But this may begin to change this year with deep learning, as algorithms and infrastructure have both become more mature. This will make applications, such as smart search, more efficient. “With deep learning technology already in play we can tell what is a person, a car, a child and a tree, even distinguishing between different individuals is accurate enough for practical use already,” said Udi Segall, Director of Business Development at
Qognify. “We have been using deep learning for many years as part of our Suspect Search video analytic application that allows to find the whereabouts of person across the video surveillance channels within seconds.”