Surveillance is so much more than cameras

When you hear “video surveillance,” the first thing you probably picture is a security camera. Conventionally, cameras have captured video — whether for live viewing by a person or a security team (to spot intruders, criminal acts, or dangerous conditions) or for later analysis when an incident demands it.

That could mean outside a bank or retailer, in a manufacturing facility, or overlooking a dangerous intersection. What unites these applications is that cameras let you view and record events at a distance, from useful angles. 

Video surveillance systems can do so much more.

Today, thanks to increasing resolution, video compression, and networking abilities (including cloud storage and management), video surveillance can do all these things much better than just a few years back. More importantly, it goes much further — by enabling you to search video as easily as you search information online and to use video data to analyze and act on what the camera sees.  

What if you’re looking for a way to spot whether your business is running effectively? Or if you want to spot trends, not just snapshots of current activity? What would have been impossible in the past is now available to even the smallest businesses. Here are just a few examples: 

• Check how busy multiple retail locations are in real time and redeploy staff as needed.
• Send video clips easily for analysis without needing physical access to your premises.
• Generate heatmaps based on trends over time for customer traffic to optimize staffing.

Some of these capabilities illustrate how third-party partners can extend the security system you already have or how you can get more from the capabilities already built into your cameras. The same video data that puts incidents in front of your eyes can also feed a wide range of AI-driven analytics. 

Smart Search

Slogging through recorded footage manually is a painstaking, error-prone process. Instead of searching recorded video and relying on human eyes to sort the data, AI can analyze video frame by frame to identify and classify people and objects and associate them with points on a timeline. This enables you to use natural language descriptions to find a specific person, object, or vehicle in your footage. 

License Plate Recognition

Tracking vehicles by license plate gives you a unique identifier for each vehicle that enters your premises. But tracking license plates through in-person visual inspection is impractical for most organizations. An AI solution lets you reliably and efficiently identify vehicles to spark alerts (“Unknown vehicle has entered the lot”), keep track of deliveries, trigger actions such as raising an entry gate, and more. 

Keeping people safer by connecting with 911

Another dramatic way that today’s surveillance is about more than cameras: If your cameras are configured with Eagle Eye 911 Camera Sharing, an emergency call placed from nearby will trigger an automatic connection to the nearest Emergency Communications Center, delivering instant visual awareness to emergency telecommunicators who can pass on concrete information to first responders. 

Eagle Eye Networks integrates AI capabilities into our Eagle Eye Cloud VMS and provides an open API through which our technology partners deliver advanced application- or industry-specific capabilities. We can’t wait to see how you’ll apply them to your own environment.

Want to see what your video surveillance system can do?

Learn more about how Eagle Eye Networks is delivering much more than surveillance cameras, across industries and around the world.