Stealing things at ISC West

We’re always our harshest critics after a show. We dissect all the data we have to see whether we got our message across or just crashed and burned.

For the IVA (Intelligent Video Analysis) challenge we had people lining up from 10am when the doors opened till the end – over 2,300 people took the challenge, which was to steal a Bosch power drill from under the nose of our IP camera without the alarm going off. It was intentionally simple - all the intelligence was in the IP camera, with only a power cord going into the camera, and a relay output going to the siren. When people realized this wasn’t just motion detection but actually behavior detection it was a pleasure to see the facial expression literally change. It was truly amazing to watch people's ingenuity under pressure to succeed.

They soon realized that they could hook a Dinion IP to anybody’s DVR, and connect the camera's relay out to the DVR’s alarm input, and thereby add true video content analysis to a single camera on an existing DVR (the Dinion IP is hybrid so also has an analog BNC output which would connect to a regular DVR).

And if they already had an analog camera they were completely happy with, and millions of others are, they could just loop thru the DVR into a little black box encoder like the VideoJet X10 and achieve exactly the same thing. Funny isn’t it – video over IP with no IP in sight. A network camera not connected to a network. You could see the gears going in people's heads - all those opportunities to go back to all those DVR sales and add a little bit of intelligence on key cameras...

Although not exploiting the full capabilities of our IVA offering, which would involve using forensic search software to investigate months of video looking for certain events, it is more than adequate for the vast majority of us. When combined with forensic search you can do things like show me all the times someone parked in the fire lane for longer than 1 minute in front of this Elementary School - it's not rocket science either but it is more complex than a black box and a simple wired relay to a DVR.

Yes, I think we can safely say we got our message across – our products are smarter than the average bear, and bringing intelligent video analytics to the masses is a good example, not just in one encoder but many varieties and all our IP cameras. Just having products that talk over IP is nothing to brag about these days – it’s what they have to say that makes the world of difference.