BriefCam Experts Share their 2023 Video Analytics Predictions & Trends

Ask the Experts!

It’s 2023! Last year we saw the world continue to display resilience as we bounced back from Covid, and – in the video surveillance ecosystem – we saw the exciting, continued evolution of video analytics as we know it. With eyes up, and hearts optimistic, let’s hear what our BriefCam experts see on the horizon for an exciting 2023.

Liam Galin, BriefCam CEO
Increased Video Analytics Adoption for Combatting Economic Downturn

As the global, economic downturn intensifies, the impact of video analytics becomes even more clear– regardless of the end user organization. Although many might hesitate at the prospect of investing in a video analytics solution when economic conditions are tough, it is more palatable to spend on technologies with proven track records for saving time and resources and increasing productivity.

Crime – which is known to increase during economic recessions – is a straightforward example. Video analytics can help combat crime on a number of fronts: By detecting and triggering rule-based alerts for indicators of suspicious behavior, such as loitering and after-hours activity, video analytics solutions deliver critical situational awareness and time-sensitive intelligence, empowering law enforcement or security personnel to proactively respond to unfolding events. In case an incident does occur, investigators can more productively and powerfully accelerate time-to target by reducing the resources and time needed to review video evidence. By applying advanced, easy-to-use filtering capabilities, investigators can refine, reduce, and pinpoint the video evidence needed to solve cases faster. Finally, video analytics can support the overall effectiveness and efficiency of law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve, by aggregating and visualizing video metadata for long-term strategic planning, analysis, and resource utilization.

The impact of increased crime doesn’t stop with law enforcement. Businesses, large and small, are the victims of theft, vandalism, shoplifting, and more. Leveraging video analytics through economic hardship helps businesses increase their situational awareness and asset protection efforts by alerting them to suspicious behaviors and accelerating post event investigations – not to mention providing insight into in-store traffic patterns, empowering businesses to continuously learn and build smarter strategies.

While addressing crime is a critical function of video analytics, this technology can also be leveraged to drive staffing decisions and ensure efficient maintenance planning: When businesses need to run a lean ship, understanding visitor trends, enables decision makers to fill employment vacancies and create shift schedules effectively, to eliminate as much waste as possible. By deploying maintenance and cleaning services by need, for example, instead of by timetable – the intelligence offered by video analysis supports businesses in ensuring investments in staffing resources are being used optimally.

We know from our experience with a global pandemic, how important efficient, agile, and impactful business practices are during economic hardship. Providing better visibility and intelligence about an environment, video analytics empowers operators to take smarter decisions based on measurable and quantifiable data.

Igal Dvir, BriefCam CTO
Balancing On-Camera & Server-Based Video Analytics

In 2022, we continued to hear about the significant market trend of migrating video analysis from servers to edge devices and cameras. On-camera video analytics will continue to develop in the years to come, but this trend is not the harbinger of industry upheaval it is touted to be. Even though on-camera analytics will be impactful as the “bread and butter” for many users, it will not negate the need for standalone, server-based video analytics for a number of reasons.

Firstly, like all hardware, cameras are a long-term investment (of about 7-10 years!). However, the world of video analytics is constantly evolving, with new innovations hitting the market on a monthly basis. On-camera analytics offer compelling point solutions for overcoming specific challenges and achieving targeted goals; but, realistically, to keep pace with technology advancements, an additional technology layer providing added sophistication and continuous innovation will be needed to complement on-camera analytics. If for nothing else, so that upgrades – whether required or desired – would not require a complex and expensive overhaul of the entire physical infrastructure. Furthermore, cameras will always have significantly less processing capabilities than an external GPU, simply due to the physical limitations of size and heat dissipation – barriers that cannot be overcome. While this is not a problem for those who need smaller scale solutions, for companies that need flexibility to keep up with rapidly changing environments, on-camera analytics will not provide a complete or extensible solution and further investment in analytics will be necessary.

The reality is that users who require comprehensive processing power, industry-specific solutions, and centralized results will continue to rely on standalone, server-based analytics technologies. Though there is a place for both edge and server-based analytics, edge innovations won’t replace server-based analytics any time soon.

Rebecca Law, BriefCam Director of Channel Management
Industry Adaptation & Evolution: Diversifying Video Analytics Solutions

2023 will be the year that video analytics shifts focus and diversifies on two major fronts: data intelligence and deployment flexibility.

It’s not news that “Business Intelligence” is the future for video data – we have already witnessed the trend towards insights-driven solutions and its impact across diverse industries. In 2023, the most savvy and creative solution providers in our industry will shift focus to learn how to implement and effectively leverage video analytics for business intelligence. This is an opportunity for systems integrators to set themselves apart from their competition while providing customers with exponential value through actionable and quantifiable business data and dashboards. It will also enable them to expand and diversify the target end users within organizations investing in video analysis, such as Chief Operating Officers. Armed with the message and technology that video analytics tools drive profitable, operational, and strategic decisions for organizations, systems integrators will engage the interest of stakeholders across executive teams.

Whereas small organizations, such as independent medical and dental practices or real estate brokers, may be more likely to take advantage of accessible, lower cost, and easy-to-use cloud video streaming and analytics, larger enterprises will be sticking with their on-site solutions because they require reliable, accurate, and complete data that comes with high resolution video streams and powerful algorithms. They can also support the in-house expertise and in-house data storage for security protection, data integrity, and system uptime reliability.

Looking ahead, it is exciting to see the video analytics world evolve and adapt to meet the diverse needs of different organization types – the industry is rising to meet the need with adaptable solutions for expansive use cases, diverse organization sizes, and evolving deployment requirements.