What's coming in 2021?
Jan 1, 2021 — Feb 12 marks the beginning of the Year of the Metal Ox. The second animal of the Chinese zodiac, the ox denotes the hard work, positivity and honesty.
Every Chinese zodiac year is defined by one of the five elements. The upcoming 2021 will be the year of the Metal Ox, and its message couldn’t be clearer: Success will come to those who work hard. Really hard. “It’s hard work, duty, discipline,”
As we now know, the world did go through a distinct changing of the times, but not in the way anyone had hoped. Political turmoil, social unrest, economic decline, and a once in 100-years global pandemic severely altered our lives. While 2020 may seem like it was an epic disaster, the year of the Rat did present us with a new opportunity: to change the world for the better. Let’s all hope so!
Digifort is working on fundamental changes in the structure. This will pave the way for a more centralized platform and meet the challenging demands of managing more and more objects within security systems.
As we move the architecture forward, we will develop more innovative and functional features which are already mapped out in the next new versions.
Our development team is also working very hard on many other big stuffs, like LPR zones, multi-tenancy, and, most importantly, cloud architecture.
We are currently working on creating the structure for any edge analytic we support. This will make Digifort even more open for any new analytics, using Edge Analytics or Server Edge Analytics, so we can take full advantage of the AI evolution happening right now.
For example, if we have analytics that gives us the type and colour of objects, like “blue car.” We could search for that.
Metadata recording already exists, hence once this search engine is developed, we could search using filters like:
- For facial recognition
- Name of the person
- Classifications (Gender)
- Classifications for IPX
- VCA
- Speed
So we could create custom filters, like all objects over 55km/h.
More use of video analytics
With the evolution of the IP Camera and more intelligent software, video analytics has become more powerful and more promising.
Cloud Solution
A growing number of providers now offer some form of a cloud-managed video solution. The connection to the cloud enables cloud storage, cloud analytics and cloud sharing of the video. This provides customers with great choice and, more importantly, from a sales standpoint, means lucrative recurring revenue and lock in a customer. However, there are some risks and limitations to this solution. Particularly when hosting on the cloud, it still has significant barriers such as upstream bandwidth. Recent improvements have increased significantly over the past decade, the increase is not enough for some sites with limited bandwidth, especially relative to the number of cameras (resolutions and frame rate) an organization might have or require.
It is not a perfect solution for every project. However, we do see significant interest and discussion than even 12 months ago.
Increased use of facial recognition for public safety
Facial recognition, in particular, warrants a more in-depth discussion because of its increased scrutiny interms of privacy concerns. In general facial recognition systems are deployed in different parts of the verticals, such as airports, metro railways and for border security.
More importance to cybersecurity
There is a global awareness of the importance of cybersecurity in CCTV systems now. Governments are announcing cybersecurity as a critical factor. This brings surveillance systems under scrutiny. Any cybersecurity policy the government plans would apply to CCTV devices too.
Higher emphasis on training
Security training is an area some has not yet given much importance to. We believe that there will be a lot of up-skilling of the workforce and training methodology changes. Security guards or the security operations in terms of manpower team has to be well trained.
In 2020, protection again COVID-19 was a responsibility that was suddenly thrust on security guards, with minimum training. In 2021, training for security guards will include measures to protect against COVID-19 or any other disease that may become a concern in the future.
Conclusion: regulations and pandemic to drive change
To sum up, Security and CCTV market would see more regulations in the coming year, especially related to Covid-19 and cybersecurity. Customers would continue to explore more hardware and software as awareness of their benefits rises. Finally, safety would become an integral part of the security professional’s profile, emphasizing training to manage COVID-19 concerns.