Written by Joel Griffin.
The pace of innovation in video surveillance seems to grow exponentially with each passing year. Just as people are getting used to having something established as an industry technology standard, something more advanced is already being developed to take its place.
Our panel of industry experts weighs in on the emerging technologies that stand poised to disrupt the market moving forward in part two of our roundtable discussion.
SIW: We’ve obviously seen a greater proliferation of 4K and multi-sensor, panoramic cameras in recent years, but what do you think will be the next great technology innovation in video moving forward?
Karl Erik Traberg, head of corporate communications, Milestone Systems: We will see even more multi-sensor technology coming to market with combinations of daylight and infrared sensors, which will greatly improve the ability of cameras to produce video and images which were not possible earlier.
Also, high-sensitivity sensors and high-performance image processors will enable the color recognition of people and settings at light levels roughly equivalent to the illumination of moonlight. By comparison, conventional night-time surveillance to date has only been possible within a limited range with the aid of infrared illumination, or by using a night mode that only captures images in black and white. Basically, night capture will become possible for the first time without the need for infrared lighting.
In addition to such technology innovations, we expect to see governments, cities and enterprises collaborating more on private-to-public video surveillance system sharing. Especially in Europe, we believe there will be a strong push for interfaces and standards, which will enable multi-vendor VMS deployments to ease investigations and faster situational awareness in emergency situations. Already in the U.S., Milestone is involved in many more public-to-public (inter-agency) collaborations in addition to the growing usefulness of access to private monitoring systems like commercial businesses and private educational institutions.
SIW: By now everyone is certainly familiar with the concept of the Internet of Things, but for many end users it remains just that – a concept. When do you anticipate that the market, as a whole, will start to see tangible ROI as a result IoT technology?
Traberg: We see the Internet of Things evolving in the way that many technology trends do: at present, we’re at the peak of hype, topping the “inflated expectations” curve. We’re still a few years away from the IoT as a pragmatic, productive reality. Security players should embrace IoT because it goes beyond security, and the expectations for it will be driven by end users. However, bearing the lessons of the dawn of video analytics in mind, the industry needs to be very careful of over-promising and under-delivering. We must be pragmatic, and at all stages aim to puncture the technology hype balloon.
One of the barriers to remove is that we have to move data management to the cloud and ride the IT wave of transferring data from on-premise to central computation power as a service. A complete new technology paradigm and business model for the security industry needs to evolve over time and make IoT scalable.
Read the whole roundtable that features the overall industry trens analyzed by Milestone executives.