Application and development of intelligent video analysis technology for security

Since the birth of intelligent video analysis technology in the 1990s, after decades of development, this technology originated from computer vision and is increasingly gaining widespread attention with its gradual commercial application.

Since the birth of intelligent video analysis technology in the 1990s, after decades of development, this technology, which originated from computer vision, has been increasingly valued by people with its gradual commercial application. As a key component of video surveillance, the intelligent video analysis market is gradually expanding with the continuous maturity of technology and is slowly forming an industry. Especially in China, the trend of intelligent video surveillance has become increasingly obvious.

With the acceptance of the pilot projects of alarm and monitoring systems in 22 cities and the second batch of demonstration cities for strengthening police force with science and technology in 2008, the safe city pilot project has been successfully completed. As the main content of safe city construction, the public security "strengthening police force with science and technology" and the public security informatization construction, the urban public security monitoring system will gradually transition from system construction to operation and management. In the application stage of the system, how to apply the large-scale system after it is built? How to closely integrate it with public security business to maximize its efficiency? How to maximize the construction benefits of the system? For this reason, the requirement for intelligent video surveillance has emerged.

1. Intelligence is imperative

The industrial development of intelligent video analysis technology provides an excellent opportunity for intelligent video surveillance. The intelligent video analysis system extracts and screens abnormal behavior events in the video in real time and issues early warnings in a timely manner, changing the passive state of traditional video surveillance systems that can only "monitor" but not "control", solving the problem of difficult evidence collection after the event, and making monitoring more proactive. Compared with traditional video surveillance systems, its faster response time and more powerful data retrieval and analysis functions have greatly improved monitoring capabilities.

More proactive monitoring: Not only limited to post-event evidence collection, but also proactively and in real time analyzes the video and promptly reports any suspicious incidents.

More comprehensive monitoring: All incoming videos can be processed in real time, not just what is seen on the TV wall, without missing any suspicious events.

More continuous monitoring: 24/7 monitoring is achieved, and the "machine eye" replaces the human eye to overcome the limitations of human fatigue.

More effective monitoring: Extract useful key information from a large number of videos and only provide users with problematic videos. Human-computer interactive monitoring mode, which realizes suspicious behavior analysis and alarm, users only need to confirm and process the videos that generate alarms.

More powerful monitoring: With diversified functional applications and gradually expanding automatically identified behaviors, it can achieve a wider range of applications.

2. Progress of Intelligent Video Analysis Technology

Intelligent Video Analysis Technology Definition

Intelligent video (IV) originates from computer vision (CV) technology (computer vision technology is one of the branches of artificial intelligence (AI) research). It establishes a relationship between images and image descriptions, so that computers can understand the content of video images through digital image processing and analysis, and achieve the purpose of automatically analyzing and extracting key information from video sources, which is also called intelligent video analysis technology (IVS: intelligent video surveillance).

Intelligent Video Analysis Market Overview

As technology continues to mature, some professional IVS research manufacturers have gradually emerged around the world, such as ObjectVideo and Vidient in the United States; NICE, Mate, IOImage in Israel; IOmniscient in Australia, etc. These manufacturers have entered the Chinese market one after another, which once caused foreign manufacturers to monopolize the domestic intelligent video analysis market. However, due to the differences between their technology and China's national conditions, they cannot truly penetrate the Chinese market. This situation not only brings challenges to domestic intelligent video technology research manufacturers, but also provides a very good development opportunity. Professional intelligent video analysis research manufacturers such as Wen'an, Zhianbang, and Feiruis have gradually emerged in China, and related products have also achieved breakthrough applications in safe cities and various key industries. There is no shortage of customized solutions in the safe city project that is in full swing. Behavior analysis functions such as fight detection and abnormal running detection are specially tailored for urban public security monitoring. Its timely warning of illegal and criminal acts such as violent injuries and robbery has become an effective measure to improve the capabilities of urban public security monitoring systems and strengthen technical prevention efforts.

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Current Application Status of Intelligent Video Analysis Technology

As a major technology to strengthen the application of video surveillance systems, video intelligent analysis technology has been widely concerned by the industry in recent years. It separates the target of customer concern from the surveillance background by analyzing the video content, and associates the target's moving direction, speed, time and other parameters with certain behavioral characteristics, thereby achieving the purpose of active monitoring and defense. It is said that the large-scale promotion and application of this technology will play a great role in improving the utilization efficiency of the current public security monitoring system, but in fact it has not been effectively promoted, so-called "popular but not popular". The author believes that the main reasons for this phenomenon are as follows:

First, most of the behavioral features that can be identified are currently limited to certain specific occasions. For example, target tracking, crossing boundaries, counting, target loss, and object abandonment are mainly used in relatively fixed application scenarios such as detention centers, prisons, museums, warehouses, factories, and subway stations. In the monitoring environment at the social level, the stability of monitoring is greatly reduced due to the complexity and variability of the monitoring scenarios, and the intelligent monitoring products that use the accuracy of alarm events as the evaluation standard have therefore highlighted their application limitations;

Second, the implementation method cannot fully meet the requirements of public security monitoring. At present, although there are many different forms of intelligent products on the market, most video analysis applications belong to front-end analysis, that is, embedded in the camera or black box through DSP. However, due to the limitations of existing video analysis technology, it can generally only analyze a specific channel or several channels of video, which is obviously not suitable for public security monitoring systems with thousands or tens of thousands of channels. How to adapt to the ever-changing and large-scale external monitoring environment and effectively integrate with security equipment is a problem that intelligent video analysis manufacturers still need to study and solve.

Third, the market price is relatively expensive. Because it is much more difficult to develop than traditional video equipment, intelligent products generally have high development costs, which is enough to affect the large-scale promotion and application of intelligent products. Price may be an enduring topic.

Fourth, there is uncertainty in user needs. Although the general understanding of smart video in the domestic market has been greatly improved compared with a few years ago, there is still a certain gap in users' expectations and cognition of smart video. On the one hand, users need to understand their own needs fundamentally, and on the other hand, they must also understand the functions of smart video and the problems that can be solved by practical applications. This requires efforts from manufacturers, engineering companies and users.

3. Future development trend of intelligent video

Based on decades of continuous attempts by intelligent video analysis technology research manufacturers in commercial applications, the author believes that intelligent video analysis technology has the following development trends in technology and application:

From a technical perspective, in order to improve the applicability of intelligent video analysis technology and make intelligent video analysis products truly commercialized, intelligent video analysis manufacturers will inevitably develop in the following directions while improving core algorithms:

(1) Adapt to more complex and changing scenarios;

(2) Identify and analyze more behaviors and abnormal events;

(3) Lower costs;

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(4) More flexible product form.

From the application perspective, it is not difficult to understand the following two points:

1. In-depth expansion of industry application needs

Different industries generally have very different demands for video surveillance, especially for the application of intelligent video analysis technology, which also determines the particularity of detection behavior types and abnormal events between different industries. With the continuous deepening of applications in various industries and the further improvement of security level control requirements, various security fields will face more and more different challenges, and their demand for video surveillance is becoming increasingly complex. How to identify and analyze more behaviors has become a problem that intelligent video analysis technology has to face in the process of deepening industry applications. Only by combining the actual industry applications and deeply understanding the specific problems of different industries can we better grasp the needs of users and implement the functions of intelligent video analysis technology into the actual application. This is also the ultimate manifestation of the future industrialization value of intelligent video analysis technology.

2. Flexible application of modular design

With the continuous improvement of security needs, users have increased their investment in video surveillance systems, and their application and dependence have deepened. Single functions or basic functions are far from meeting the actual needs of the industry. In the future, for specific users, advanced functional modules such as perimeter, abnormal behavior analysis, and dynamic tracking will be further applied, so that the video surveillance system will be flexibly expanded on demand in a modular way. Providing a complete set of intelligent solutions based on industry applications will be the main direction of the development of intelligent video analysis technology.

4. Prospects of Intelligent Video Analysis Technology

With the continuous advancement of major projects such as "National Emergency Response System", "Safe City", "Safe Construction", and "Technology-Enhanced Police" across the country, the domestic video surveillance market has a promising future. As the scale of the video surveillance market continues to grow, the application of intelligent video-related products will also expand significantly from relatively concentrated areas to various industries. In terms of market demand, the entire market's awareness of intelligent video analysis is constantly improving. On the one hand, users have psychologically transitioned from the original "what" to "how to do it"; on the other hand, some professional video analysis research manufacturers are also working to improve existing core technologies, further enhance and optimize existing algorithm structures, and strive to pay more attention to users' actual needs in terms of functions, applications, and prices, in order to achieve the best system product form. As high-end applications of video surveillance, functions such as perimeter detection and object tracking have been successfully applied in various key industries and are gradually showing their power.

In view of the gap between user expectations and reality, video analysis research manufacturers and users are trying to find a balance between functions and applications. How to correctly plan intelligent video analysis, what strategies to use, and how to have a clearer understanding still require close cooperation of the entire industry chain, which is also the inevitable trend of the future development of intelligent video.