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Video analytics: the enabler of proactive guarding

22 Sep 09

Geoff Thiel explains why video analytics is fast becoming a vital tool in the armoury of security guarding and remote monitoring operations, and outlines how the technology will radically change the way in which Control Rooms operate.

By Geoff Thiel

Our current security industry is very much a people-based business with some 320,000 individual licences issued by the Security Industry Authority (SIA) for a range of security personnel such as door supervisors, security officers and Public Space Surveillance monitoring staff.

Many roles require someone who offers frontline ‘on the ground’ security guarding capabilities. These officers are the public face of private security as they are on the scene when incidents happen, preventing crime, investigating problems and protecting your customers, employees and property.

It's fair to say that certain roles are more ‘back office’, with a security officer viewing multiple surveillance screens to detect incidents. For all of these roles, though, the effectiveness of the individual is only as good as the systems and back-up that a security organisation provides for him or her. A crucial system in the security officer's armoury is video surveillance.

Over four million surveillance cameras offer blanket surveillance coverage of the UK’s transport hubs, town centres, businesses, trains and buses. The typical security Control Room can look like the brigge of the USS Enterprise, with banks of screens and video recording equipment. Often, these screens are effectively ‘unwatched’ because there is insufficient staff to monitor them.

In more critical applications, security officers spend hours monitoring the screens to identify suspicious incidents, track possible threats, alert the on-the-ground security officers to incidents and provide real-time information on the progress of a given incident. Using surveillance cameras in tandem with security officers monitoring the screens allows front line security officers to be more effective than if they were identifying incidents on their own.

Remote monitoring: ripe for change

If there is one area of the security industry which is ripe for change, it is in the area of remote monitoring. We are all well aware of the problems of individuals monitoring single screens, let alone multiple screens for any period of time. It's well publicised that the maximum effective attention span of an individual monitoring a screen is around 20 minutes, and during this 20-minute period the level of effectiveness progressively decreases.

Indeed, this short human attention span is acknowledged at airport security checking areas when individuals pass their hand luggage through the airport x-ray scanners. The scanner operators are only allowed to monitor the scanner screens for up to 5-10 minutes before another colleague takes over. Monitoring is a vital role - it provides the intelligence required to detect incidents and supports appropriate reaction. Without the ability to detect and react to incidents quickly, CCTV can be relegated to becoming a ‘post-mortem’ tool which simply records incidents for analysis after a security episode has been reported and the damage done.

Video analytics solutions are designed to detect incidents and take away the heavy burden of monitoring multiple video feeds hour after hour. The video analytics solutions never tire, get bored, distracted or need a cup of tea. There is no denying that being a security officer in a CCTV Control Room is a vital role, but the key part of the role is alerting and managing incidents, not staring at screens trying to detect an incident.

In this specific area, video analytics can dramatically improve performance.

Dramatic improvement in analytics

Video analytics solutions have improved greatly over the last five years or so. Many earlier solutions were plagued with high ‘false alarm’ rates, where the solution had detected movement that was largely irrelevant, such as a tree swaying or a dog running across an area. With more robust detection algorithms powering the solutions, these often irrelevant movements are screened out, in turn dramatically reducing false alarm rates.

Solutions are now also much more affordable and simpler to set-up. Previous solutions were very inflexible and typically required expensive specialist assistance to configure.

How will video analytics affect the day-to-day lives of the security officer in the future? The biggest effect will be on the security officer who is working in the Control Room, which can be the most mundane and tedious part of the role. The continuous monitoring of the screens will largely be automated, with the video analytics solution analysing every video channel to detect specific events such as intrusions, loitering, car movements, etc. The security officer will instead react to incidents detected by the system and instruct the on-the-ground security team to investigate further.

With the help of the analytics flagging up the event, the officer can instantly examine the video of the whole incident so that he or she can fully brief the on-site team. Alerts can be sent to the mobile phones of relevant officers so they can see the images before they intervene.

Safer and more effective role

The Control Room security officer will be able to use video analytics to help make the on-site officer’s job safer and more effective. Rather than one officer viewing four or five live video screens as is the case today, the officer will be able to manage the alerts from many more analytics-enabled channels (therefore increasing overall operational efficiency).

The speed of investigation will also increase. Video analytics can cope easily with challenges such as identifying cars parked illegally or suspiciously. The systems can also show footage only on groups of individuals in a specific area and this analysis can be done in seconds, not hours or days.

Video analytics will change the way security officers operate. For those in remote monitoring centres, they'll be able to focus on doing what they do best. In other words, managing security incidents proactively.

Job roles will change but for the better as security officers will require higher skills levels to cope with a high performance environment.

Best of all, the frontline, on-the-ground security officer will have the power of video analytics behind them, giving them the fastest, most precise intelligence to help them to succeed in what is now a highly challenging world.