We met up with Ted Oade, Seagate director of Product Marketing, at the SkyHawk Stadium experience zone in Seagate’s CES 2018 booth, to talk about the various ways security and surveillance technology is evolving to not just keep us safer but also help our cities run better and cleaner and provide data insights that make life easier.
We hooked up with our security system partner EZVIZ to demonstrate the serious benefit of keeping fans safe at public events — but in a fun Data Games way. At Skyhawk Stadium our visitors can compete on an interactive foosball table using monitors connected to a surveillance monitoring system. It’s an entertaining cross between a physical and a virtual game.
Watch this short video to hear Oade’s take.
At CES we’re talking with customers and partners, discussing how organizations, businesses and agencies are using security technologies and video intelligence to improve consumers’ and citizens’ lives.
Surveillance video capture technology today serves so many useful purposes beyond traditional security. It enables businesses and other organizations to gather insights about how their business processes are working, improve customer experiences and expand operational efficiency.
“Now we’re on the cusp of AI technology being deployed for surveillance,” says Oade. “So for instance a retailer can look at certain surveillance video and it can be analyzed in such a way to help them lay out a store, or for detecting crime like a theft in process or someone having a heart attack.”
Jessica Burton, Seagate SkyHawk product marketing manager, agrees, “Advances in camera resolutions along with AI technology enable, for instance, retailers to better understand customer behaviors and improve shopping experiences in order to reduce the length and time spent waiting in checkout lines, improve retail layouts, and enhance product placement to serve customers’ expectations — which can improve customers’ ability to find products they want, and increase their loyalty to the retailer, all of which helps the retailer boost revenue.”
“Cities, on the other hand, can recognize better traffic patterns in order to divert traffic routes away from accidents and bottlenecks as well as enhance efficiency to improve roads, save energy resources, and reduce environmental pollution,” Burton adds. “The financial industry can more easily spot suspicious and unusual activity while also ensuring compliance and mitigating risk. While in healthcare, doctors can more quickly and cost-effectively diagnose patient ailments with Deep Learning video technology.”
Visitors to Seagate’s CES Experience Zone enjoy a fun version of foosball at our SkyHawk Stadium experience zone
What challenges do organizations face to leverage the potential of data to improve security and intelligence?
Today’s video security environments demand extensive data with each frame. They require seamless recording, playback, and streaming in real-time. Consumers who set up video security to safeguard their homes or their small to medium-sized businesses need NVR or DVR systems flexibly designed and with components purpose built to work in those systems. Large organizations need systems that support dozens of cameras without dropping frames.
Seagate SkyHawk hard drives are optimized precisely for these types of video security environments. They are designed to support up to 64 cameras without dropping frames, and are unsurpassed in performance, speed, and capacity, and they’re right-sized with 8+ bay systems (NVR or DVR).
“You know a few years ago, we were using fairly low-resolution cameras to capture surveillance video,” Oade points out. “Today 4K video cameras are becoming fairly common. To store that kind of data is just tremendous. Working with system partners, we actually enable them to take their applications to the next level, by delivering reliable storage that’s also affordable.”
“And this past fall Seagate launched SkyHawk AI, the very first surveillance AI-optimized hard drive for those looking to drive faster, smarter decisions based on deep learning applications,” says Burton. “These AI-optimized hard drives support not only video surveillance workloads, they also support AI streams that have knowledge — meta data — tied to every frame, for deep learning applications. This AI knowledge allows information to be found with more efficient precision to make quicker and smarter decisions.”
“AI or artificial intelligence workloads are becoming more and more important to the customers of our partners who deliver these solutions,” says Oade. “The SkyHawk AI drive takes that to the next level by being able to work very well with really randomized workloads. So you can have both — streams of video coming in, while you’re also doing analytics or AI on those video streams simultaneously — using a SkyHawk AI drive.”
“The biggest challenge customers face is how to design their infrastructure to reliably support their video security needs,” Burton explains. “Fundamentally, customers need high performance, reliable storage that is optimized to handle the very large video workloads 24×7, that may also include AI tagging. With this in mind, video security customers require more than a standard PC hard drive. A surveillance-optimized drive is necessary to support the around the clock workload rate and ensure there are no dropped frames. In a world where data is king, every frame counts in order to make a difference and add value to customers.”
