How Surveillance Is Transforming These Top Six Industries

Changing trends and surveillance technologies are creating powerful new solutions across safety, security, and day-to-day operations for these six leading industries.

Surveillance is rapidly changing across the world, and the technology supporting it is getting pretty complex fast. Gone are the days of analog cameras and single-person control rooms. Today, effective surveillance spans an interconnected, intelligent ecosystem of high-definition imaging, multi-modal sensors, data-sharing networks, and powerful analytics—a combination resulting in insights derived from digital images and video, otherwise known as “computer vision.”

Industries from just about every vertical are leveraging advanced surveillance technologies to protect employee well-being, safeguard communities, and improve overall processes and services, but perhaps none more than these six key industries where surveillance solutions are achieving some of the most impressive results around the world.

Education

Just ten years ago high schools were one of the primary users of surveillance cameras. Today, however, we see nearly every division of education integrate and adopt new surveillance technologies in order to keep students, faculty, and employees safe—whether that’s from vandalism, theft, or a potential active-shooter situation.

On college campuses, surveillance is more than just a tool for safety. It’s become a powerful recruiting device and persuader for students and parents who are increasingly conscientious of campus safety. In fact, popular sites such as US News & World Report include campus safety as part of their college rankings, referencing safety data compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.

State and Local Government (SLG)

When it comes to government, surveillance is largely about safe communities. From small-scale town-wide initiatives to major country-wide overhauls, state and local CIOs are leveraging quicker, smarter, and more secure surveillance infrastructures in order to keep their communities feeling safe and to meet the rising demand for more efficient interaction and information transfer. According to a recent IDC report, intelligent transportation and data-driven public safety leveraging video surveillance and street lighting represent a quarter of spending by smart cities this year.

For many state and local governments the top priority is modernizing mission-critical legacy systems to support integration with newer, more secure infrastructures, and government leaders are seeing the successful impacts right away. For example, 78 percent of those who have deployed cloud-enabled solutions say they have lowered their asset-investment threshold and improved their ability to innovate. That includes decreasing response times to criminal activity and emergencies, deterring criminal and gang activity, providing digital evidence and documentation, and improving safety on roads and sidewalks.

Effective SLG surveillance includes counter-terrorism, and when it comes down to it, it’s about creating an environment where the community as a whole can feel safer, knowing police and other emergency responders are equipped with the best tools to react and respond quickly.

Transportation

Branching out from state and local government, the transportation industries that create and connect these communities share several of the same problems. Mass transit—including trains, subways, buses, planes, etc. all have crime. Theft, assault, vandalism, and terrorism are most effectively prevented and stopped with intelligent end-to-end engineered surveillance systems that not only document current crimes but deter them in the future.

When it comes to airport security, the first thought that tends to come to mind is Customs and Border Protection, but it’s about so much more—including safety and crime prevention at TSA checkpoints, baggage claim areas, tarmacs, and terminals.

Transit systems are also incorporating computer vision to improve surveillance for traffic incident management, first-responder alerts, analyzing behavior of travelers, and helping to eliminate overcrowding during peak travel hours. For example, busy subway systems can leverage people counting to alert engineers when trains have reached capacity.

Healthcare

Healthcare as a leading surveillance market may come as a surprise to some, but a remarkable determining factor that consistently comes out of industry surveys as to whether healthcare employees leave or stay in their positions is how safe they feel in the workplace. This is critical in such an extremely competitive industry where one of the largest challenges is attracting and retaining highly qualified employees—employees who need to feel safe walking around the hospital, being with patients, and walking to and from parking lots often in the middle of the night. Computer vision is also being deployed in healthcare facilities to help identify workplace-comp fraud and undue claims as well as to help prevent theft of prescription drugs.

An up-and-coming surveillance use case in healthcare is remote patient monitoring and digital patient sitters. Video surveillance and computer vision help provide round-the-clock virtual care to those that need it most while helping to minimize overcrowding in hospitals, giving patients the freedom to be at home versus a hospital bed. The right visibility of those patients in turn helps caregivers administer the best care possible.

Casinos and Entertainment

Casinos are unique in that they differ from most other industries in one major way: strict surveillance requirements are legally required to be fulfilled before business doors can even open. Because so much surveillance technology becomes a business line item, budgets are set aside. That being said, it becomes the utmost importance for casinos to invest in the right technology that’s reliable and consistently operating for business continuity.

For example, since each gambling table is required to have three cameras covering it at all times, losing one camera can force a table to shut down. A lost table means lost profits. Now consider if a larger percentage of cameras fail, then the entire casino floor or even beyond would be required to shut down. Issues with surveillance hardware or software can translate to substantial losses for a casino business.

Retail

Many modern retailers are using video surveillance in some fairly straightforward use cases like traditional loss prevention, but some are leveraging edge-to-core-to-cloud architecture and hybrid strategies to stand out from their competitors in a way that is anything but traditional.

Classic loss prevention is a cornerstone of all retailers—looking for stealing either internally or externally and reducing the amount of loss that occurs so that every dollar saved goes towards the bottom line. Retailers are now able to use computer vision not just to identify losses that are actively occurring, but to predict complex patterns like customer insights. For instance, what kind of display will engage a customer the most, or for warehouse-style retailers, what are the risks associated with stacked items that may potentially collapse and cause injury and a lawsuit?

End-to-End Surveillance from Camera to Core to Cloud

A recurring pattern across industries comes down to the difficulty in deciding what kind of technology stack and surveillance solution is appropriate for a particular organization and how to navigate the complexities of testing, validating and deploying an integrated system. Ideally, the solution needs to be flexible and scalable enough to solve today’s problems while effectively preparing for problems that may arise tomorrow—whether that’s terrorism, vandalism, theft, or a potential active-shooter situation.  And on the flip side, what opportunities can be had from this new age of computer vision, whether it’s automated traffic alerts, virtual sitters, or customer-retention programs?