Hitachi releases new video analytics software for smart cities and digital enterprises

Hitachi Insight Group, Hitachi Ltd.’s global unified internet of things (IoT) business and go-to-market (GTM) unit, released new video analytics software to improve and expand on its Smart City and Public Safety solutions portfolio.

Through a combination of computer vision and advanced analytics, Hitachi Video Analytics (HVA) is able to obtain key insights and create real-time alerts that can provide cities, airports, campuses, transportation agencies, and businesses with operational and business intelligence, smarter transportation, traffic and parking management, and more effective public safety and security.

The software’s operational and business intelligence feature facilitates people counting, queue detection, activity analysis, directional counting, and image enhancement to deliver insights that help cities and organizations improve operations and customer experiences.

The smarter transportation, traffic and parking management component enables functionality such as vehicle counting, traffic analysis, parking space detection and license plate recognition, helping cities and businesses to improve traffic and parking for residents, commuters and customers.

The software increases public safety and security by sending intrusion detection, left-behind object detection, facial recognition and camera tampering alerts to public safety departments.

HVA brings advanced analytic methodologies and unique features to Hitachi’s video security and monitoring stack, which delivers an improved user experience, a higher quality video data for analysis and help to protect privacy.

These features include object detector, which provides 4-D reconstruction of two-dimensional video images to improve accuracy and significantly reduce the number of false-positive incidents; scenario-based analytics, which ensures that each analytic module uses a custom algorithm for the analytical engine to improve performance and accuracy; privacy protector, which automatically detects and protects entire human figures as well as tracks and records all access to video data to help support transparency and help combat misuse.

Other features include video enhancer, which filters out interference like rain and snow to provide clearer views and support high quality video monitoring and more accurate analysis; and camera health monitor, which provides automated detection of camera-tampering or damage.

As part of Hitachi’s Smart City and Public Safety solution portfolio, HVA expands on Hitachi’s expertise in IoT and video technologies.

HVA integrates with and extends Hitachi Video Management Platform (VMP), which is a virtualized storage, networking and compute appliance.

The software can also be used with Hitachi Visualization Suite, which integrates IoT data from video cameras and other disparate systems and sensors to provide a map-based unified view.

The combined use of these solutions establishes a comprehensive video stack designed to help Hitachi’s government and private enterprise customers obtain greater value and insight from video data to ultimately improve operational efficiency, enhance customer experiences and increase security.

“Video is an effective tool for keeping people and property safe, but still remains a significantly underutilized source for operational, business, and public safety data today. In a world where security cameras are mission critical and deployments are growing exponentially, our customers want to get greater value and insight from their video environments,” said Mark Jules, vice president of public safety and smart city solutions at Hitachi Insight Group.

“Hitachi Video Analytics is an intelligent solution for public and private sector organizations to extract rich operational and security insights from video data, while helping to safeguard the privacy of their customers, employees and the citizens they protect. With this advancement to our Smart City and Public Safety portfolio, Hitachi is setting a high bar for innovation that challenges the industry to evolve and provide better value to its customers.”

HVA is available now from Hitachi and select partners in North and South America, the United Kingdom and all APAC countries with the exception of Japan. Hitachi will expand availability to other EMEA markets later this year.

Earlier this year, the Austin, Texas police department began deploying a sensor aggregation platform from Hitachi Data Systems Federal, in an effort to conduct criminal investigations more efficiently.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  Hitachi  |  image recognition  |  licence plate readers  |  safety