3xLOGIC is a leader in commercial electronic security systems. They provide commercial security systems and managed video monitoring for businesses, hospitals, schools, and government agencies. Managed video monitoring is a critical component of a comprehensive security strategy for 3xLOGIC’s customers. With more than 50,000 active cameras in the field, video monitoring teams face a daily challenge of dealing with false alarms coming from in-camera motion detection sensors. These false notifications pose a challenge for operators because they must treat every notification as if it were an event of interest. This means that the operator must tap into the live video stream and potentially send personnel to the location for further investigation.
3xLOGIC wanted to improve their managed video monitoring product VIGIL CLOUD with intelligent video analytics and provide monitoring center operators with real-time smart notifications. To do this, 3xLOGIC used Amazon Rekognition Video Streaming Events, a low-latency, low-cost, scalable, managed computer vision service from AWS. The service enables 3xLOGIC to analyze live video streams from connected cameras to detect the presence of people and filter out the noise from false notifications. When a person is detected the service sends a notification that includes the object detected, zoomed in image of the object, bounding boxes, and timestamps to monitoring center operators for further review.
“Simply relying on motion detection sensors triggers several alarms that are not a security or safety risk when there is a lot of activity in a scene. By utilizing machine learning to filter out the vast majority of events, such as animals, shadows, moving vegetation, and more, we can dramatically reduce the workload of the security operators and improve their efficiency.”
– Ola Edman, Senior Director Global Video Development at 3xLOGIC.
Video analytics with Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events
The challenge for managed video monitoring operators is that the more false notifications they receive, the more they get desensitized to the noise and the more likely they are to miss a critical notification. Providers like 3xLOGIC want agents to respond to notifications with the same urgency on the last alarm of their shift as they did on the first. The best way for that to happen is to simply filter out the noise from in-camera motion detection events.
3xLOGIC worked with AWS to develop and launch a multi-location pilot program that showed a significant decrease in false alarms. The following diagram illustrates 3xLOGIC’s integration with Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events.
When a 3xLOGIC camera detects motion, it starts streaming video to Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and calls an API to trigger Amazon Rekognition to start analyzing the video stream. When Amazon Rekognition detects a person in the video stream, it sends an event to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which notifies a video monitoring agent of the event. Amazon Rekognition provides out-of-the-box notifications, which include zoomed-in images of the people, bounding boxes, labels, and timestamps of the event. Monitoring agents use these notifications in concert with live camera views to evaluate the event and take appropriate action. To learn more about Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events, refer to the Amazon Rekognition Developer guide.
“With over 50,000 active cameras in the field, many without the advanced analytics of newer and more expensive camera models, 3xLOGIC takes on the challenge of false alarms every day. Building, training, testing, and maintaining computer vision models is resource-intensive and has a huge learning curve. With Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events, we simply call the API and surface the results to our users. It has been very easy to use and the accuracy is impressive.”
– Charlie Erickson, CTO at 3xLOGIC Products and Solutions.
Conclusion
The managed video monitoring market requires an in-depth understanding of the variety of security risks that firms face. It also requires that you keep up with the latest technology, regulations, and best practices. By partnering with AWS, providers like 3xLOGIC are innovating and adding intelligent video analytics to their security solutions and modernizing their offerings without having to invest in new hardware or develop and maintain custom computer vision analytics.
To get started with Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events, visit Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events.
About the Authors
Mike Ames is a Principal Applied AI/ML Solutions Architect with AWS. He helps companies use machine learning and AI services to combat fraud, waste, and abuse. In his spare time, you can find him mountain biking, kickboxing, or playing Frisbee with his dog Max.
Prathyusha Cheruku is a Principal Product Manager for AI/ML Computer Vision at AWS. She focuses on building powerful, easy-to-use, no-code/low-code deep learning-based image and video analysis services for AWS customers. Outside of work, she has a passion for music, karaoke, painting, and traveling.
David Robo is a Principal WW GTM Specialist for AI/ML Computer Vision at Amazon Web Services. In this role, David works with customers and partners throughout the world who are building innovative video-based devices, products, and services. Outside of work, David has a passion for the outdoors and carving lines on waves and snow.