Why metadata is better data for video analytics!
Metadata technology can help create innovative products for intelligent security applications. Our article in Professional Security Magazine (May) outlines how metadata can increase the effectiveness of VMS systems.
What is metadata?
“Metadata” is a term used to describe data that ‘informs’ us about other data. In surveillance applications, it is the data relating to changes or events in a video stream. Metadata provides identity and context to the events, so they can be categorised, sorted, searched, and recovered more easily and provide information such as:
- Real-time alarm triggering and notifications.
- Post-event, forensic searching.
- Statistical analysis and reporting.
- Driving event or motion recording, reducing storage overheads.
“Machine understandable”
Digifort applies ‘machine understandable’ intelligence to the video, which is absolute, measurable, and scalable. This comes in the form of ‘identifiers,’ such as time, location, movement, identity, size, dwell, type and location of objects and people. Making the video data ‘machine understandable’ allows analysis of only the changes, trends or specific types of events deemed relevant, not the entire video stream. This vastly increases VMS system efficiency, speeding up the search and retrieval of relevant video and only applying analytics processing where needed.
Metadata and security
Metadata offers an insight and context into significant, security surveillance functions – especially those relating to search, alarm handling and reporting, such as:
- Date and time
- Camera obstructions
- Scene motion
- Camera movement
- Location
- Attributes
- Colours
- Sizes
- Gender
- Speed
- Direction of travel
The metadata helps operators to identify incidents and events and respond in real time.
