The Doppler Quarterly Summer 2018 | Page 15

For those of you old enough to have had it in rotation on a turntable or a CD player (let alone on eight-track, reel-to-reel, or cassette), The Who’s Who’s Next is a great album. One of the best lyrics comes in the final song, Won’t Get Fooled Again: “Meet the new boss… same as the old boss…” Well, video analytics is kind of like that (ok, maybe not, but bear with us). It is the “all new” IoT data source that everyone is going crazy about all over again. From a technology perspective, there is little surprise as to why: • Video analytics requires lots of hardware (CPU / GPU / storage) and con- sumes lots of cloud services • It creates opportunities for software developers to create highly specialized products to focus on specific use cases, industries or domains • It was tailor made for an edge-to-enterprise — or edge-to-cloud architecture • It leverages advanced AI and machine learning algorithms that are best built and trained in the cloud and then deployed locally at the edge From a business and use case perspective, the problems really haven’t changed much over the past decade, yet the capabilities are now there to do so much more across a range of industries and domains: • Retail Loss Prevention, Safety, Marketing and Merchandising solutions • Industrial Safety and Security solutions (“worker down,” “sleepy operator,” buddy system compliance) • General Security solutions (suspicious objects, lingering or loitering, unautho- rized access) • Manufacturing Quality solutions (visually inspect for defects or needed rework) • Identity solutions (facial recognition and beyond) In all cases, video analytics, like all IoT solutions, is enabling context to be derived from data. And in real-world solutions, computers can monitor dozens or even hun- dreds of simultaneous video streams. They don’t blink, and they don’t look away. What kind of context does video analytics derive? That depends on the use case, but in all scenarios it creates actionable events derived from the data. Has somebody jumped a fence? Perimeter violations are easily addressed. Has somebody wiped out the razor blade shelf at the local pharmacy? Maybe the actor intends to pay for all the product he/she has picked up. Maybe not. At least a loss prevention professional can be made aware instantly of the situation before a would-be thief has the chance to leave the store. Recently, CTP had the opportunity to showcase video analytics in action at Hannover Messe in Germany, the largest industrial/manufacturing trade show in the world, with over 230,000 annual visitors and exhibitors. Our showcase was developed in partnership with Intel and featured in Google’s booth in the Digital Factory hall. SUMMER 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 13