A new version of the Brief- Cam technology, a video synopsis solution that compresses video events and displays them simultaneously, enables security officers to filter and refine security video footage using colour, the size of an object and the direction of movement, says closed-circuit television and broadcast solutions company Graphic Image Technologies executive Laurence Smith.

The new version, BriefCam Syndex, augments BriefCam VS Forensics, the original compressed video technology, with a powerful filtering capability, making specific events and objects more quickly discov- erable. This also enables security officers to focus on specific portions of the surveillance to dis- cover security breaches and security events more easily.

BriefCam technology uses processing software to rapidly analyse hours of video, compress the footage and highlight only those portions of the video where events occurred by analysing how pixels changed during the timeframe. It then displays the captured events simultaneously to enable a user to view all the events holistically and select a specific event to view on the original footage.

“About 99% of video recordings worldwide are not viewed at all, despite being filmed. Only when an event or security breach occurs is the video reviewed, which requires many hours, owing to the shear volume of video footage taken by security cameras,” says Graphic Image Technologies MD Mark Chertkow.

BriefCam technology enables security companies to take a different approach, because security officers and managers can review all the video footage taken during or prior to their shifts within minutes to determine if officers have performed their duties or whether incidents occurred during this period.

“The technology makes video surveillance useful once again and all the footage taken by video cameras can now be reviewed daily as part of a security officer’s duty and not only in extraordinary circumstances,” notes Chertkow.

The new filtering capabilities can also be applied one after another and even videos contain- ing dense imagery and much movement can be filtered for relevance. For example, a tall man wearing a blue shirt and walking in a northerly direction can now be identified in settings such as busy and crowded city sidewalks or university campuses.

The cost of such a system is about R120 000 per licence, but one licensed workstation can perform sufficient processing to summarise several video cameras’ streams each day.

“The BriefCam technology enables security staff to perform active duties and use their available video resources actively and effectively. More proactive use of surveillance video increases, as security not only reacts to known events after the fact, but can also discover events by actively reviewing video,” notes Smith.

The technology is used in several other industries, where the existing surveillance video can be used to analyse the patterns of cus- tomer traffic in certain aisles, and of daily traffic in cities.