Pan, tilt and zoom to foresee the future
We are witnessing a massive inflow of population into urban areas, in fact, close to 68% of the total world's population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050. This megatrend has made smart cities a necessity, globally as well as in India. Smart cities are virtually transforming themselves into ‘living’ ecosystems, comprised of inanimate yet smart connected devices capable of recording, storing, processing and communicating critical information 24x7. Powered with technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT), these devices keep the pulse of a smart city alive. Cameras represent one of the key elements of surveillance systems that make up the smart city market, which is expected to grow to $2.75 trillion by 2023. After all, a city cannot be ‘smart’ if it is not safe. Therefore, surveillance systems are crucial to the success of the smart city initiative.
Smart Cities, Smarter Tomorrow
Let’s look at a couple of examples in smart cities that can make our lives safer and better. In India, more than 150,000 lives are lost each year in road accidents. With smart signals, traffic can be better managed, reducing accidents and congestion. The recent community CCTV Nenu Saitham project in Hyderabad City Command has adopted a state-of-art smart surveillance implementation, which will track, monitor and analyse the video feed to detect criminal activities, traffic violations and road conditions.
Researchers from India and UK have developed an improved real-time autonomous drone surveillance system. The system boasts of an accuracy of 84.44%. As per the whitepaper published, this system has proven to be very useful around automatic teller machines (ATMs) and has detected 96% cases of the theft. The system has been shown to detect fire with an accuracy of more than 90.0% and identify criminal actions such as purse snatching, child kidnapping, and fighting, using distance, velocity, and area to determine the human behaviour. It can identify the criminal actions with an accuracy of around 85%. It can also be used for the detection of abandoned bags in busy public areas.
In addition to better management of traffic and curbing crime, smart surveillance systems can be used to rush medical help to save citizens who have a high health risk profile and suffer a health episode out on the street.
One good example is Rio de Janeiro. The second-most populous municipality in Brazil has integrated connected video feeds, improving the response time of its emergency services by around 30%. It brings together 30 of the municipality’s departments along with private suppliers in a single monitoring room to track real-time conditions in the city, and coordinate responses to emergencies and disruptions.
There are innumerable use-cases that can help our lives become better and safer in a smart city for example, green buildings and smart utilities to name a few.
Is the Infrastructure ready for Data Surge?
It is important to note that smart video not only assists in maintaining public safety but can also be used to ultimately improve infrastructure, driving in part the emergence and growth of smart cities. The video security market is set for tremendous growth; as per a leading market research firm the video surveillance market will grow from $1.70 Billion in 2016 to $5.93 Billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 22% from 2017 to 2022.
However, it is equally important to use storage solutions that are designed and tested specifically for the needs of the surveillance industry, as it has a very different type of workload. In surveillance, the ultimate goal is to capture what’s happening, at all times without fail, so we don’t miss an important event. However, most of the captured footage is not reviewed, except in the case of an incident. Therefore, surveillance drives are optimized to prioritize write cycles of video that are being recorded by the surveillance cameras over the playback or read cycles, of the recorded video. So there is a much higher balance of writing than reading to the hard drive. This enables the hard drive to have high bandwidth for high-quality recording of video. Additionally, the surveillance hard drive is also optimized for both software and hardware RAID to deliver high performance in multi-drive configurations. Most importantly, on-board storage on cameras is crucial. Having storage on the camera allows uninterrupted recording of potentially valuable video during intermittent communication failure with the NVR. Therefore, for a safe and smarter tomorrow, we need to be smarter in our infrastructure planning today.
Forward-Looking Statements:
This article may contain forward-looking statements, including statements relating to expectations for Western Digital’s products, the market for these products, capabilities and applications of its products for data strategies. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including development challenges or delays, supply chain and logistics issues, changes in markets, demand, global economic conditions and other risks and uncertainties listed in Western Digital Corporation’s most recent quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, to which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.
