Article Excerpt:
TWST: May we start with a brief overview of your company and solutions?Mr. McChesney: Vidient Systems designs, develops and deploys behavior recognition software systems that enable video surveillance cameras to monitor for and detect behaviors that threaten safety and security, alerting guards in real-time and intelligently managing event response. It is used today to monitor secure locations at major transportation facilities, corporations and public institutions. There is a fundamental disconnect today in the way that video is captured and accessed. The problem is that you have too many cameras deployed and not enough people to watch them. So what we are trying to do is to create a new paradigm in terms of how video is accessed. Currently, close circuit TV and a VCR or NVR acts as a dumb capture and record device that stores raw video. You have to go through all of the tape and replay it to discover what is going on for a forensic search. Vidient's flagship product called SmartCatch(r) is able to analyze video in real time. The product is programmed to capture a security threat as it is occurring and grab a video clip of that violation and send it to responder in real time. We believe that we can transform this technology into a predictive tool and become so conversant with the way a facility operates that we can detect these activities before they happen so that responders can effectively connect the dots, which is what the 9/11 Commission was so concerned about. Another benefit to SmartCatch, is that it is able to tag everything that is happening in that video, whether it's a suspicious activity or not, and then that is stored in a database, which becomes fully indexed and accessible on the basis of any kind of a parameterized search that you want to create. So instead of having to replay the video and just hope you can spot what happened, you can institute a specific search and bring up the video clip. For example, say somebody tailgates through a door - that is where one person is authorized to go through a door and a second one follows behind through the door without authorization. If security personnel wanted to look at the tailgating incident, we have the ability to create custom searches so that they could search for any variety of things that may or may not be related to a suspicious activity. The software enables you to concentrate on events and see if there are patterns that were not picked up at the time of the incident. Additionally, SmartCatch contains intelligence escalation and alert mechanisms, so that not only can a responder be alerted in the monitoring station, but alerts can also be automatically sent to first responder groups you deployed for a particular incident. A security director could them track how everyone responded to a particular event. So it's a closed loop from detection analysis, classification, to response. Two weeks ago, we were at the leading ASIS security trade show in San Diego, and we were the only company on the floor that was doing a live demonstration in which CCTV TV was integrated with a Hirsch access control system. We were simulating a portal and having people walk through the gate. A person would swipe the badge and the door would open, meanwhile somebody else would sneak in behind them. You could see on the monitors around the booth that the incident was captured on video and identified as a tailgating violation. Then we would stream that video clip right out to a PDA or cell phone. It was getting enthusiastic response, given that this was all happening in real time, and people could see themselves being caught doing this behavior.
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