AI is coming to video surveillance, but what kind of intelligence do end-users need?

When IBM's Deep Blue computer won its first game of chess against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1996, the public got a real taste of how powerful computers had become in competing with human intelligence. Since then, not only has computing power grown exponentially but the cost of processing power has fallen dramatically. These trends, combined with advances in artificial intelligence algorithms have enabled the development of systems that can, in some instances, perform tasks better than human beings. Video surveillance is one of these tasks; and certainly there is a large market opportunity given there has been little increase in the ability to analyze video, despite the massive growth in surveillance and in the storage of video data. According to IHS, 127 million surveillance cameras and 400 thousand body-worn cameras will ship in 2017 - in addition to the estimated 300 million cameras already deployed - and approximately 2.5 billion exabytes of data will be created every day.