Video analytics: smart solutions that bring everything into focus

Video surveillance (or closed-circuit TV, CCTV) has long been part of many organisations’ safety and security processes, but it’s a technology solution that comes with a number of challenges and limitations: 

• You need people to permanently monitor and analyse the video feed. Being human, they may lose concentration from time to time, and miss events that might matter.
• There’s lots of footage to store, most of which you’ll never need to look at again.
• The surveillance solution can’t help you understand what it’s seeing, or notify you about issues and problems so that you can take action.

The 340 million occupational accidents estimated to take place globally each year, according to the International Labour Organization, show how hard it is to get that monitoring right. And let’s face it, workplace accidents and injuries cost both workers and employers dear.

Video analytics changes the game

Smart video analytics software (sometimes called video analysis) changes the game. A video analytics solution combines video surveillance technology with algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), enabling it to go from seeing to understanding what’s happening in a variety of situations.

With these intelligent video and analysis capabilities, video analytics takes over the task of constant monitoring and analysis. What’s key is that it involves people (through alerts) only when it detects anomalies, deficiencies, risks or dangers.

Depending on how you use an AI-based analytics solution, it can help you improve real-time protection for your workers against illness, accident, injury and even death; or guard against data theft and security breaches. Let’s find out how.
 

Protect workers against illness and injury

If you’re responsible for a complex environment, such as manufacturing, logistics or warehouse operations, you’ll be well aware of the potential dangers your workers may be exposed to, as well as the regulatory requirement to meet occupational health and safety (OHS) guidelines and best practices.



Now you can use an intelligent video analytics solution to protect workers from a range of health and safety risks through customisable, automated detection, combined with alerts that incorporate information to identify and locate a person who’s at risk.
Typical video analysis software applications for workforce protection include:

Equipment control. Check that workers are wearing the right personal protective equipment (PPE) for the job – such as face masks, glasses, helmets, safety vests, gloves and boots.

Distance monitoring. Check that the required distance between employees, or between an employee and a piece of machinery, is being respected. 

Lone-worker safety. Protect lone workers by recognising and classifying body movements that may indicate illness or injury, allowing prompt intervention.

Acoustic surveillance. Detect sounds from security camera microphones, such as alarms or cries for help, to enable timely intervention.

Dangerous situation monitoring. Detect people who are inside a predefined exclusion zone; or who are inside a facility during an emergency evacuation. 

Temperature screening. Analyse thermal images of people to check for body temperatures that exceed a given threshold. This lets you separate individuals who may be ill from those who are healthy to prevent the spread of infection.

Cough detection. The ability to detect people coughing or sneezing using security camera microphones is another way to help prevent the spread of infection.
 

Keep information, spaces and assets safe

As well as keeping people safe, intelligent video analytics can help you enhance the security of public or private spaces; or protect key content and confidential information, or valuable property and assets. It goes beyond simple surveillance by automatically detecting people, analysing their behaviour, spotting anomalies and sending alerts.

Among the security applications for state-of-the-art video analytics software is suspicious behaviour detection. This solution helps protect valuable information, objects or other assets against potential security breaches by identifying suspicious behaviour and alerting the security team, enabling a rapid response to any potential breach.

Video analytics protects state exam papers

The Czech Republic’s state examination institute – Centrum pro zjišt'ování výsledků vzdělávání (CZVV) – prints hundreds of thousands of tests for secondary-school graduation every year. 
To protect the integrity of the test documents during the printing process, CZVV previously used standard video camera software and technology in the print room. If anything suspicious arose, the security team had to go through hours of recordings to spot, for example, someone loitering near the printer for too long, or secretly photographing test documents.

Now CZVV uses Konica Minolta’s Suspicious Behaviour Detection solution, a video analytics solution that combines customisable algorithms and AI with Mobotix video cameras. The intelligent solution constantly monitors movement in the printing area and alerts the administrator if it detects suspicious activity.

“Now the artificial intelligence monitors the document printing process and automatically evaluates the situation, and this leads to great savings in labour costs,” says Jindřich Mach, Director of the Internal and Manufacturing Infrastructure Section of CZVV. 
 

Ready to improve your organisation’s safety and security?

An intelligent, automated, high-performance video analytics solution, tailored to your organisation’s needs, can help you:

• Reduce the likelihood of workplace accidents, injury and illness – increasing workplace health and safety, improving working conditions, driving up productivity and protecting your brand reputation
• Better protect content, information, assets and spaces – enabling you to take rapid action in the event that potential data theft or unauthorised access is detected
• Save costs in terms of human resources and data storage – with no need to constantly monitor every camera feed and store every video frame

Find out more about how Konica Minolta’s smart video analytics solutions can help your organisation improve workplace safety and security. And look out for our next blog, which discusses the use of video analytics solutions in manufacturing and logistics environments to automate quality inspection processes – increasing accuracy and consistency, reducing costs and supporting Industry 4.0 digital transformation.