The ongoing evolution of IP Surveillance

While vanilla IP cameras still dominate the network video surveillance space, video analytics is gaining ground and, for applications such as number plate recognition, where clarity is of the essence, HD cameras are starting to be considered. By Prashant L Rao

Surveillance has never been hotter what with public places, manufacturing plants, malls and the like coming under the digital eyes of surveillance equipment. In India, the market is presently dominated by analog equipment largely because it’s cheaper for small deployments that don’t need the rich feature-set of IP surveillance. However, the IP side of this market is growing. In 2012, the overall video surveillance market in India was worth $255mn of which the network video space was worth $64.9 mn. This sub-segment of the surveillance market is expected to grow by 30%+ YoY.

“We are investing about 15% of what China is investing,” commented Sudhindra Holla, Country Manager, Axis Communications India.

Some verticals where IP surveillance is in demand include city surveillance, bank branch surveillance, public sector, luxury resorts, retail, healthcare and transportation. Its share is growing and it is expected that the tipping point where IP starts to dominate this category will arrive in a few years.

“IP surveillance’s market share is increasing and, by 2015, it should be higher than that of analog surveillance,” said Tejas J Mehta, Marketing Manager, eInfochips Ltd.

Looking at the reasons for analog’s present dominance, Subhashini Ramakrishnan, Chief Technology Manager, Dax Networks, said, “The prominent players are not geared up for IP. Price is a major factor. Analog deployments are in a disintegrated manner. Bandwidth is another constraint that affects IP surveillance. Retail is primarily on analog and will continue to be so.”

Despite that, the scenario changes when organizations look at a pan-Indian presence. When it’s a question of covering multiple locations and analytics is required, companies tend to look at IP. “Management of surveillance is key and, therefore, bank and city surveillance projects are going in for IP,” added Ramakrishnan. 

Another factor holding IP surveillance back has been the perception on the system integrators’ part that it is not a part of IT deployments.

“SIs are wary of doing surveillance as they see it as a security thing. We will upgrade our existing SIs to start doing IP surveillance. It is a CIO mandate as it comes on the IP network,” said Praveen Sahai, Director of Sales, India & SAARC and Strategic Marketing Director – APJ, Iomega.

“The larger market is on the retail side, it’s analog and that portion of the market will take some time to switch. The rest of this year will be the time of transformation provided that we can educate the customers and persevere,” added Sahai.

With the constant threat of terrorism hanging over the landscape, the government is investing in surveillance in a big way.

“The next big demand is from Government sector from both State and Central governments. Some metro and mega cities in India are already under IP surveillance and a few have been under testing for a couple of years now, which will now start getting converted into business. As State governments have also become serious about IP surveillance, the biggest demand in the next couple of years would be for securing tier 1 and tier 2 cities across India,” added Mehta of eInfochips.

HD IP surveillance

Technology never stops evolving and what was the state-of-the-art becomes obsolete as time passes by. Time was when megapixel cameras were the topmost with VGA being good enough. It still is, for many applications, but HD cameras are available for applications that need the higher resolution.

“There’s lot of HD is being deployed in city surveillance. For general surveillance, you don’t need HD. When you need analytics, number plate recognition etc. HD can provide the necessary details,” said Holla of Axis. For hospitality, after the attacks on the Taj, hotels are cautious and want to cover the lobby area and entrances. HD is being deployed in these cases.

“We launched Q series cameras that offer enhanced video capture at night. You can capture color even in low light situations. Malls, five star hotels, refineries etc. are going in for these solutions,” he added.

“If the cameras are within the premises, they aren’t going in for HD. When it comes to outdoor deployments, HD is coming into the picture. When people are serious about surveillance, about identifying people’s faces etc., resolution comes into play. In Retail, they are looking at surveillance as a deterrent so they look more at the cost of the solution,” commented Ramakrishnan of Dax.

“HD IP cameras cover a larger area due to the clarity of high definition and so the number of devices required is lower than in a non-HD setup, which reduces the overall cost,” said Mehta of eInfochips highlighting an advantage of these cameras.

“Petrol pumps, nightclubs, highways, railway tracks and some remote areas will come under surveillance, perhaps three years down the line. At that stage, night vision cameras will be well ahead in demand. For now, they are primarily installed at airport runways and in some retail stores,” he added.

Video analytics

Capturing video is just one part of the surveillance equation. You need video analytics to analyze the recordings and glean insights. Of course, if it’s simply a matter of investigating incidents, you may not need this but analytics is a godsend for the IP surveillance applications that are coming up in banking and retail.

“If a bank wants to track how many people used an ATM in a day or a retail outlet wants to track footfalls—that’s basic analytics. Then there’s tracking people movements across an imaginary line. We also look at advanced analytics in retail where you track where customers spend more time in a store in order to understand the end-user behavior in a retail outlet. You can track customer satisfaction by seeing how employees behave with a customer. People counting, video motion detection, number plate recognition, crowd alerts, etc. all go beyond general surveillance,” said Holla of Axis.

Video analytics has become an integral part of the surveillance set-up. Shrewd theft and attack prevention requires an automated surveillance set-up, which enables security to respond either in advance or in no time. This is only made possible by real time analytics; with video analytics in place; the central monitoring station gets real time alerts as per the defined rules. “Nowadays video analytics is not limited to surveillance; it has a bigger and strategically important role to play. A few advanced users have already started utilizing analytics beyond its traditional uses,” commented Mehta of eInfochips. He gave a couple of examples:

• Cameras with video analytics are installed in digital signage used for some marketing campaigns at shopping malls. The camera’s analytics give a strategic report of the number of visitors that stayed in front of a sign for a particular time span and also focused on some element of that campaign. With this data analysis, a smart marketer can evaluate the success of a particular campaign, modify it as per the customers’ interest and find the right location to place it for higher recall
• Video analytics can detect crowd behavior. This is handy for sport matches, religious functions, protests and political rallies etc. where the crowd is huge. If crowd’s behavior becomes dangerous, then the control station is immediately informed by an automated alert, generated by a predefined rule, so that action can be taken promptly.

“Video analytics has become the smart tool for surveillance as well as for strategic purposes. In the next five years, video analytics will be the most useful weapon for industries and governments,” added Mehta.

Not every sector uses analytics at this point. “Banks don’t use analytics at all. 90-95% don’t. They want footage. If something happens, then they need proof. In situations where high security is a must—city surveillance, airports, thermal or hydel plants etc.—that’s where analytics is used. If someone enters a restricted area, they will want to know. High-end retail is talking about it but only some malls might be using analytics,” added Ramakrishan of Dax.

In the Cloud

Cloud computing dominates the talk in almost every category of IT and it’s starting to make its presence felt even in the field of IP surveillance.

“We are talking to telcos about offering private and public video surveillance as a service. We have won a few deals that are connecting thousands of locations using the telco’s network. Eventually, things will move to the telco’s data center rather than residing in the company’s infrastructure,” said Sahai of Iomega.

“We want to provide an EMC-based comprehensive architecture to a customer who wants to connect hundreds of locations. The architecture is defined so that you store megapixel video locally and send a lower quality file to the central server. Locally you can go as high as 30 fps but even a 7 fps stream is enough to go on. The consumption of local storage will be substantially higher but we have to reduce the quality of the second stream because of bandwidth constraints. You have EMC central storage and an Iomega box at each location. When you have thousands of locations pumping data to the central location, you are talking about petabytes of data,” he added.

There’s a software solution that sits on the Iomega box, it’s a video management application that handles the camera streams. The software’s from Mindtree though Iomega also works with international players like Soleratec. The central management software is a more complex solution that can get into maps, details, etc. Features like license plate recognition, face recognition, video stitching etc. are additional options.

“On the service provider side, we are working with Tulip. Their Bangalore facility will host video surveillance as a service as well. They have set aside a portion of storage and server hardware for surveillance,” said Sahai of Iomega.

IP vs. analog

Although, on first sight, the cost of an IP-based system is higher, over the long term, it is efficient as compare to analog. IP’s advantages include ease of maintenance, ease of use, features, fewer number of devices are required, there’s lesser manual activity etc. “For users who understands these points, even at a small quantity of cameras, IP surveillance  wins. The user should also take in account points like video analytics and the strategic uses to which he can put it,” said Mehta of eInfochips.

“Within analog there’s the basic analog, DVR with IP support and the DVR with H.264 support. The biggest drawback of analog is the lack of scalability as you can connect only eight cameras to a single DVR. To push it to a central site you need to use H.264 and push all of the camera’s feeds at once. For centralized monitoring or multi-site—analog isn’t the right solution. If it’s a local solution with two or three cameras, analog works. You need to put a dedicated server and software for synchronization of data etc. in a multi-site set-up. In a multi-site scenario, IP scores. IP has its own advantages in terms of storage etc. Picture quality is better. Analog can’t go beyond 300 feet unless you use fiber. For audio you need a separate cable. A PTZ analog camera requires a separate cable,” said Ramakrishnan of Dax.

“Today, 70% of the market is analog. By 2015, it will be 50:50. Then IP is going to rule the roost. It runs on the LAN, there’s local intelligence, analytics—these are all benefits of IP. Still, for small set-ups of two to four cameras, analog has a cost-advantage. If you look at the metros, IP is the product of choice. For anything over 15-20 cameras, IP scores,” said Holla of Axis.

NAS to the rescue

When you record video from many cameras, the question that arises is where do you store all that data? NAS boxes are a way out, particularly for larger setups or at the central location in a multi-site deployment.

“When you have a few cameras you have to record data somewhere, say, on a computer. You can run the video management software on a NAS box and store the recording there. Some storage can be on the camera itself. In some cases, you need a NAS box as not everything can be stored on camera. If you are deploying four to eight cameras, you can store recordings on the camera itself. If you have 8-20 cameras, then you may need a NAS box,” said Holla of Axis.

“If there are existing NAS boxes, they use them for storage footage. If there’s no NAS, then companies are looking at using PCs for local/temporary (a week’s data) storage. At the central site, NAS is used for the storage along with video servers for monitoring,” said Ramakrishnan of Dax.

“Because of centralized backup and the ability to share information, NAS has become the choice of small and even medium business units. In India, NAS is ideal solution for nationwide retail chains having small stores in different cities, small industrial units having factory and office at different places, educational institutes etc.,” said Mehta of eInfochips.

While there are hurdles to be surmounted, IP surveillance is on the way up and once the SIs become comfortable with the prospect of rolling out this technology and users start to appreciate the rich functionality, it will go places.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com