High Tech Funding Fosters Milestone Video Innovations

Milestone Systems is developing new capabilities in video surveillance for more than security, through a partnership with the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation.  Research that is ongoing in a 3-year project to develop technological innovations is already paying off: the latest release of Milestone XProtect 2014 launched a new metadata framework that vastly improves the speed of searching and analysis with the video software.

In collaboration with the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation, Milestone Systems is making video surveillance more than just images on a screen. Milestone's software manages video for security uses, but can also support and optimize activities in production, logistics, marketing, sales, healthcare, intelligent buildings, environmental control, and other analytical applications. Thanks to the XProtect open platform architecture, other companies are integrating software applications with Milestone's video management software to adapt it for particular operational needs in different business sectors.

Research Project funded by Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation

Cutting-edge video surveillance solutions are also being developed as part of a big research project with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Aalborg University, Securitas and Nabto, which started in 2012 and runs for three years. Milestone is leading the project and the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation has contributed with DKK 15 million to the project. The aim of the project is to interpret the recorded video material so the content can be described automatically. An example could be video surveillance in a retail store that automatically documents customer traffic. Shop owners can then plan for when lines are too long or analyze statistics on the most visited areas in the store.

"We are very proud to see this project bearing fruit already. We are still in phase one and expect to present to the market several new solutions for searching in metadata - the framework has already been released in XProtect 2014. During the next phases, we will do research among other things on how the software can learn to distinguish between normal and abnormal activity in video images. This means video surveillance can proactively give an alert before an incident occurs, and further enable use as a business tool in many more operational scenarios," says Hans Jorgen Skovgaard, VP of R&D at Milestone Systems.

"For example, if there is an accident or an assault at a bus station, the police or security personnel can search for the exact area where the incident happened by linking GPS coordinates with the video recordings from the buses, and within a few seconds they will have the relevant recording of the offender or other people involved," he continues. 

Speedier Searches = Faster Response

The new software capabilities have also made searching much faster in general, and for specific objects in the recorded video material. This could be, for example, a wanted blue car that was parked at a distance of 200 meters from the City Hall in a certain time period. Normally, it would take a long time to find the car because you have to search through all the video material from the area. But with the new solution coming out of this project, searching is done only in metadata, which is data about the recording, such as GPS position, orientation, number of cars, number of people, movement, temperature, etc., rather than in the entire video footage. This makes the search for events in the video up to 1,000 times faster.

The metadata technology can also be used with mobile phones as moving security cameras where GPS coordinates and compass information can be stored with the video. Operators thereby will know precisely where the video was recorded. Used in this way, mobile phones can increase security and safety, and threatening behavior can easily be proven. The technology can also be used as evidence of pollution emissions, for resolving insurance claims, or many other applications yet to be explored.

Skovgaard sums it up: "The possibilities are endless with the constant developments of our video software technology. We can see that there will be a flood of new solutions from our many partners, building further on the open platform video surveillance from Milestone."