Analytics can help enterprises transform video-surveillance systems into force multipliers, IXP official says

It is important that video analytics are designed to be used appropriately, based on the purpose for the surveillance and location of the camera, Consalvos said. Video-analytics algorithms can be customized to account for the time of day that an activity occurs, he said.

“For example, if somebody would leave a package in front of an office at 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s probably not a real high priority—it might be UPS, it might be FedEx, it might be the postal service,” Consalvos said. “But if somebody leaves a package at 2 o’clock in the morning, it might be a much higher priority. You have to tailor that with the client to what the specific risk profile of that community might be.”

With this in mind, IXP representatives work with customers to assess the risk profiles of the enterprise, so the overall solution can work most efficiently and effectively, Consalvos said. When this is done properly, video surveillance can be a powerful and flexible tool, he said.

“You can do two things,” Consalvos said. “One, you can be very proactive. Say you were looking for a red van that was canvassing specific areas to create some type of criminal event. You can actually program the system so that every time a red van comes into the view of one of the cameras, it sends an alert to the operator, who can then try to get a license-plate number or send an emergency responder.

“Or, you can be reactive. You can say, ‘We had a report that a crime occurred. The witness said it was a red van. We want to see every red van that went through our community during the past 24 hours,’ and it would pull up every piece of video that had that. Just the ability to do that in seconds—compared to weeks and weeks of investigative time—is a huge benefit to public safety.”