Will artificial intelligence revolutionize video analytics?

Since the inception of networked video surveillance, many companies have worked to develop a variety of different analytics to enhance the value of the systems to end-users. Some vendors have been more successful than others in being able to provide reliable video analytics to their customers and, after a period in which the technology was greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism, it has now become commonplace in many surveillance installations across a wide range of vertical markets. While the use cases for analytics have changed, the technology itself has remained relatively the same – algorithms are created to search for certain pre-defined actions within a camera's field-of-view. However, the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) means that the future of analytics will lie not in the creation of static algorithms but on the ability of machines to learn what operators should and should not be alerted to. For example, for those installations that use virtual trip wires for notification of perimeter breaches, many analytics cannot decipher between a human coming onto the property, which would obviously be the primary concern, vs. an animal, which would be of little interest.