iOmniscient’s Automated Surveillance product, iQ-Hawk, is now integrated with Sony’s HD network cameras to provide customers with a high resolution system that not only provides the user with a comprehensive portfolio of video analytics capabilities, but also enables him to automate the surveillance process with minimal human intervention.
iQ-Hawk is a unique application which performs multiple detections and recognitions of people and vehicles, simultaneously on a single camera. As events are detected the system automatically zooms in on the event to capture the face (for humans) or license plate (for vehicles).
Traditionally PTZ cameras were used to enable operators to zoom in on an event to see the culprit. Criminals who understood how the technology worked were able to defeat the system by sending in a decoy. When the PTZ camera zoomed in on the decoy the criminals could perpetuate their crime outside of the limited view of the zoomed camera. iQ-Hawk cannot be defeated in this way as it continues to detect events in the entire field of vision even while it performs multiple digital zooms to identify the culprits involved in different events.
This internationally patented capability pulls together iOmniscient’s very sophisticated detection engine (including slip and fall and the ability to detect theft and abandoned objects in crowded scenes) with its revolutionary Face Recognition and License Plate Recognition systems.
The system uses megapixel cameras which can be expensive in terms of their network bandwidth and storage requirements. However, the use of iQ-Hawk allows the system to operate with an order of magnitude reduction in these resources. On a 5 megapixel camera the savings in bandwidth and storage can be 200 times (this means that if the storage previously cost $200 it would cost $1 if designed with iQ-Hawk. The technology has therefore transformed the design and economics of such systems.
The cameras are the eyes. For a video analytics system to provide good performance it must be matched with “good eyes”. Mr Bala Rajendran, iOmniscient’s Group Engineering Manager, said that the Sony’s HD Network cameras that they had tested worked extremely well with iQ-Hawk “and were ideal for the dual purposes of detection and recognition. Working with such cameras means the full potential of iQ-Hawk could be realised”.
