Video Synopsis Software – The Need
How often do surveillance personnel need to review hours of video footage to track a person’s movements, identify a specific event, or monitor the motion of an object (of interest) during a target period? And, as the number of cameras in the surveillance network increases; so does, exponentially the time spent by the surveillance personnel reviewing the footage. This is where the importance of Video Synopsis Software comes in.
Video synopsis software is an advanced computer program, powered by AI Analytics, that automatically creates a condensed summary of a long video. The software analyzes the video content, extracts important events, and makes a short summary that can be viewed in just a few minutes. They can be useful for numerous applications, such as surveillance, sports analysis, and entertainment.
Viewing and analysis of recorded surveillance video footage are time-consuming and labor intensive, despite the adoption of video analytics practices and tools in video surveillance networks. A video analytics tool can generate alerts against a set of defined, and potentially illegal activities. However, once flagged off, reviewing or tracking the progress of the individual or object of interest, through the recorded footage, is a manual and tiresome process.
This article looks at Video Synopsis as a potential solution for lengthy and time consuming review and analysis of surveillance video footages.
What is Video Synopsis?
Video Synopsis is the name given to the technology that aims to reduce hours of video footage to a few minutes. The technology does so by tracking and analyzing moving objects (called events), and converting the incoming video streams into a database of events and activities. The information is then presented as a time-compressed video with links, for each event, to the actual video stream.
The Video Synopsis Software technology was invented by Prof. Shmuel Peleg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and has been commercialized in a product range named BriefCam, from a company that goes by the same name.
The process start by detecting and tracking objects of interest. Each object is represented as a “tube” in the “space-time” of the video stream (a sequence of video frames). Objects are detected and stored in a database in near-real time.
When a user requests a summary of a specific time period, all relevant objects from that timeframe are extracted from the database. These objects are then condensed and time-shifted to generate a shorter summary video that maximizes activity density (tube-packing). The schematic below visually represents this concept.
Figure 1: Tube-packing – creating the video summary by re-timing the space-time tubes (X = the 2-dimensional XY axis of each video frame). Credit: BriefCam, Ltd.
Video Synopsis Software – Technology and Applications
BriefCam Video Synopsis Software is available in two variants: BriefCam VS Enterprise and BriefCam VS Forensics. The Enterprise version of Video Synopsis Software offers on-line and near-real time creation of video summaries, while the Forensics version is a stand-alone (off-line) packaging of the technology.
The BriefCam Video Synopsis software system include hardware unit (server) connecting to a LAN consisting of DVRs/NVRs and cameras. A user accesses the BriefCam summary and index using a software client running on a PC. The figure below illustrates the hardware implementation of the Video Synopsis technology.
Figure 2: Hardware implementation of Video Synopsis Software
Video Synopsis software delivers its best results in use-cases involving the following operating conditions:
- Continuous recording and not event-triggered recording
- Area facing potentially fatal threats
- Significant object (animate/inanimate) movement, excluding dense crowds
- High bandwidth backhaul between NVR/DVR and BriefCam server
- More than a handful of cameras in the surveillance area
Going by the above conditions, city surveillance projects and critical infrastructure projects would be good fits for implementing Video Synopsis Software technology. The following images provide a snapshot of Video Synopsis software.
Figure 3: BriefCam video summary example Credit: BriefCam, Ltd.
Conclusion
Homeland Security agencies in India have been remiss in implementing video surveillance of critical infrastructure and in major cities, despite the life-saving need for such infrastructure. Be that as it may, the same agencies can take a leap forward in their attempt to ensure safe public spaces by implementing Video Synopsis technology along with the traditional video surveillance infrastructure.
Contact Mistral’s Homeland Security team to know about our advanced Video Synopsis Software.
