Introduction: Video surveillance and monitoring is about more than capturing footage; it’s about extracting valuable insights from that data. The result is real-time actions to respond to anomalies detected from insights proactively. The computer vision industry is seeing a trend where intelligent video processing is moving to the edge of networks, all while leveraging the scalability and accessibility of the public cloud. Leveraging videos on the edge is becoming a winning formula for enterprises trying to gain a competitive edge through automation. The use of cameras is widespread in consumer-facing solutions like home security as well as in purpose-built applications like self-driving vehicles. This write-up explores applying computer vision to video footage in enterprise use cases.
Examples of video footage in enterprise use cases:
● Modern manufacturing assembly lines rely on cameras for quality control and efficiency improvements through various applications. Cameras track individual process times to pinpoint bottlenecks and optimize areas. They also monitor hazardous areas to detect safety violations, such as workers not wearing protective gear or entering restricted zones. The integration of cameras in manufacturing assembly lines enhances automation, safety, and quality assurance, reflecting innovative manufacturing practices.
● Video technology has become surprisingly versatile within the agricultural sector. By increasing the use of video footage, agricultural efficiency is enhanced, benefiting livestock management and crop yield. Cameras placed in barns and pens can monitor livestock in real time. Farmers can remotely check animal health, identify potential birthing problems, and even deter theft or intrusions. Drones and other aerial vehicles equipped with cameras can capture high-resolution images and videos of vast fields. This footage allows farmers to detect areas of stress, pest infestations, or nutrient deficiencies much earlier than they would be able to on foot, enabling them to take quick and targeted actions to address the issues. The integration of video technology into agricultural operations represents a significant shift towards data-driven farming, enhancing productivity, sustainability, and resource management.
● Innovative retailers use video to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and gain valuable business insights. Retailers can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences by analyzing foot traffic patterns, dwell times, and product interactions. This information can be utilized to optimize store layouts, product placements, and staffing levels, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and increased sales. By generating heat maps from video data, retailers can identify store areas where customers spend the most time. This enables them to strategically place high-margin products in these locations or adjust the layout to distribute foot traffic more evenly. The retail industry is poised to leverage video footage further, exploiting new opportunities for innovation and growth.
● Traffic cameras provide real-time video footage for authorities to monitor road conditions, respond to incidents, and analyze traffic patterns. This footage is primarily used to monitor and manage traffic in real time. This helps traffic operators make informed decisions to reduce congestion and optimize traffic flow, especially during peak travel or unexpected events. The application of video footage analysis enables real-time traffic monitoring, improves law enforcement for road safety, and assists accident investigations.
The Benefits of Video Processing on Edge Devices
● Latency: Real-time video analysis is essential for some applications, and edge devices provide immediate responses that require lower latency. Such applications include traffic monitoring, intrusion detection, and industrial safety.
● Privacy: Wide-ranging regulations cover the privacy requirements of data collected from videos, including purpose, consent, and notification. Edge solutions provide encryption and access control while limiting data retention to meet these regulations. Sensitive footage can be analyzed locally; only anonymized results (e.g., object counts and motion patterns) are transmitted.
● Lower bandwidth costs: Balancing low latency with high bandwidth costs is challenging when processing videos on the cloud. Only crucial insights and metadata are transmitted instead of continuously streaming raw video to the cloud.
● Resilience: Edge analytics can operate without a constant cloud connection, ensuring continued functionality in areas with intermittent connectivity.
The Value of Public Cloud
● Scale: Cloud computing enables businesses to scale storage and compute resources quickly and efficiently. This flexibility enhances performance and accessibility, improving operational efficiency and supporting business growth and innovation.
● Analytics: Leveraging cloud computing resources for analytics offers many benefits like scalability and elasticity that can significantly enhance an organization’s data analysis capabilities. In addition, public cloud platforms offer advanced analytics tools and algorithms that can be accessed as services, enabling organizations to apply sophisticated data analysis techniques without needing in-house expertise.
● Remote access: Public cloud facilitates collaboration by providing centralized data storage and access, allowing teams to work together effectively, regardless of their physical location.
The Plainsight and SoftIron Partnership
Video surveillance has evolved from simple capture and storage to proactive, insight-driven action. Intelligent video processing has moved to the network edge to achieve this transformation while leveraging scalability and public cloud access. The combination of edge and cloud is crucial for businesses looking to unlock the full potential of video data for efficiency, security, and innovation. Plainsight and SoftIron have partnered to provide edge processing and flexible cloud connectivity. Some benefits customers gain from the two companies are as follows:
1. Real-Time Action from Edge Insights: Plainsight allows businesses to make quick decisions based on visual insights. Their AI-powered ‘Filters’ can be deployed on any platform that supports containerized workloads. These filters can be customized and act as digital eyes that analyze live camera feeds. SoftIron’s HyperCloud is a suitable edge solution for this purpose. It is a private cloud that provides fast local processing crucial for real-time decision-making and automated responses.
2. Data Sovereignty: Privacy and Control: The partnership between Plainsight and SoftIron emphasizes security and data ownership. Plainsight Filters are containerized to keep customer data on-premises and protected using offline training. SoftIron’s HyperCloud enables this within a secure, private cloud, making it applicable for sensitive applications.
3. The Power of Scalability: This solution is designed to expand with growing needs. The SoftIron HyperCloud has a modular architecture and Plainsight’s Kubernetes-based Filters, allowing easy scaling. Plainsight Filters, with their cloud-native design, can be deployed across SoftIron’s HyperCloud nodes in a private package optimized for the network edge to analyze additional video feeds.
4. Edge Deployment Made Easy: Plainsight and SoftIron’s IT-friendly solutions allow small teams to deploy and manage the video intelligence pipeline without deep machine learning or cloud infrastructure knowledge.
5. When the Physical and Digital Converge: Plainsight Filters are developed to imitate human vision and decision-making process, providing digital representation of trained human insight to physical locations where it’s required. This capability allows businesses to install these Filters in different environments if a camera is connected. The flexible architecture of Plainsight’s FilterBox, which is not limited to specific hardware, when combined with SoftIron’s HyperCloud’s scalable infrastructure, facilitates the deployment of vision AI in various settings, from factory floors to remote outdoor locations.
Challenges:
1. Combination with Existing Infrastructure: Integrating new technology like edge processing and analytics with legacy camera systems or network infrastructure can be complex. Compatibility issues, network configuration changes, and balancing old with new requirements can create unexpected hurdles during deployment.
2. Data governance: Organizations should define clear data governance policies around data retention, access controls, and compliance with privacy regulations, as policies may vary depending on the industry and region.
3. Storage: It is crucial to balance local processing needs with cloud storage for edge devices. This requires thoughtful architecture and capacity planning.
Summary:
Overall, integrating video analytics, edge computing, and cloud capabilities offers enterprises a powerful tool to improve efficiency, security, and innovation across various industries. The path for automation and insights using video footage can only be solved partially with edge or cloud solutions but is ideally suited with a hybrid approach. Potential hurdles include integrating legacy systems, maintaining data governance, and balancing edge and cloud storage.
The collaboration between Plainsight and SoftIron exemplifies the synergy between edge and cloud computing, offering businesses a scalable, secure, and efficient solution for video data processing. Plainsight’s AI-powered Filters and SoftIron’s HyperCloud enable real-time, actionable insights while ensuring data sovereignty and easing deployment challenges. This partnership addresses the complexities of integrating cutting-edge technology with existing infrastructures, navigating data governance, and balancing processing needs with storage requirements. Through this blend of edge and cloud computing, enterprises are equipped to unlock the full potential of video data, paving the way for a future where digital insights drive physical world actions, fostering efficiency, security, and innovation across various sectors.
About Plainsight (Source: Plainsight)
Plainsight Technologies is the comprehensive vision AI factory. Plainsight Vision Intelligence Filters let companies of all sizes see more business as they measure and automate quality control, production yield, compliance, inventory, and other critical business operations using their existing camera feeds. Filters are containerized computer vision applications composed to solve specific business problems that run on FilterBox, our proprietary Runtime Engine. Learn more at plainsight.ai
About SoftIron: (Source: SoftIron)
SoftIron is a Silicon Valley-based worldwide leader in true private cloud infrastructure. HyperCloud by SoftIron allows organizations to build a true private cloud on-premises that deploys, manages and consumes like public cloud. HyperCloud provides the elasticity of cloud in a solution that is fast and simple to deploy, driving extreme agility. HyperCloud delivers the benefits of AWS Outposts or Azure Stack HCI but in a cloud-neutral solution. Learn more at www.softiron.com