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How Analytics Add Power to Security Cameras

Apr 18, 2019

“We’re stopping crime daily.” — Mitch Stiltner, COO at Alpha Video Surveillance

When you think about surveillance videos, you might associate them with blurry scenes that you only review after a crime has been committed. But what if we told you they can now be used to prevent crime?

Surveillance cameras have been around for decades, but new advances in technology have made them more effective at preventing crimes.

Gone are the days of fuzzy video, manual footage analysis, and ineffective night vision. Today’s video surveillance tools offer property owners incredible analytical power that significantly reduces crime.

Analytics Is Changing the Game with Crime Prevention

Video surveillance analytics is a tool used by security professionals and property owners to use camera footage more effectively. In the past, all a camera could do was record footage. That was it. If you wanted to search that footage for a specific person, or car, or incident, you had to sift through hours of recordings until you found a specific incident.

Today, we can use powerful computer algorithms to search and monitor that footage automatically. Let’s take a look at a few of the most powerful new tools that video surveillance offers.

   Perimeter Protection

Perimeter protection automatically notifies you the second an intruder approaches your property. In the old days, unless you were actively monitoring your camera feed, you wouldn’t catch a subject passing through the frame. Perimeter protection changes that.

As a property owner, you can set up specific boundaries around your entire property. When a subject crosses that boundary, cameras equipped with perimeter protection will trip and notify a live guard.

Perimeter protection is especially useful when paired with remote guarding and two-way communication. According to Stiltner, “Perimeter protection can send alerts to one central location, so a guard talks down an individual in real-time and deters them from continuing on the property.”

    Smart Search

A majority of property crimes happen during overnight hours or over long weekends. In the past, finding footage of incidents meant combing through hours of footage.

With Smart Search, that process takes seconds. You can set search parameters to look for any vehicles or people that entered the property during a range of times and get immediate results. Smart Search is so powerful you can even specify a person’s outfit or a car’s make or model.

This is useful for security in gated communities who may want to be notified whenever a certain car has entered the property, or for businesses looking for a trespasser who has already been identified by their clothes. Smart Search can even work with facial recognition.

   Facial Recognition

Facial recognition is great because it allows you to permit entry into buildings for some and restrict it for others. Similar to license plate recognition, you can use facial recognition with Smart Search to find footage of specific individuals across hours of recorded video.

Hotels and casinos use facial recognition to be notified whenever a VIP has entered the building, while some businesses may use facial recognition to detect the presence of a disgruntled ex-employee who poses a risk for vandalizing or breaking into the property.

    License Plate Recognition

Imagine if your neighbor was assaulted by someone with a pickup truck. Would you want that truck coming back to your neighborhood looking for more trouble? Probably not.

Ideal for gated businesses, HOAs, and gated communities, license plate recognition can help you manage vehicles that enter and exit your property. Cameras identify license plates and automatically open the gate, so residents don’t need a clicker, code, or a transponder.

You can also create blocked vehicle lists to bar certain license plates from entering your property. License plate recognition also ties in with Smart Search so that you can scour hours of footage for a specific license plate.

Reduce Risks with Remote Services

In addition to powerful analytical tools, modern video uses remote guarding to lower the risk associated with guard intervention.

“There’s no one on the property to have to intervene with an actual individual who’s got a gun or is on drugs. It’s a live, two-way audio at a command center talking to them directly, so there are no altercations possible,” says Stiltner.

That’s if on-site guards choose to intervene at all. Often, the low rates most security guards receive for their services discourage engagement with possibly dangerous subjects. It’s a lose-lose situation for property owners, who have to choose between a security guard who puts themselves in danger or a guard who doesn’t engage with a subject at all.

Video surveillance with remote guard services allows property owners to reduce their liability, increase their level of protection, and lower their overall security cost.

Want to find out how remote guarding and powerful surveillance tools can improve security at your property? Get a free quote by contacting us today.