Analytics Signs of Failure

When trade magazines run negative articles, you know a technology is in trouble. This month, SDM released a report on security integrator's experiences with video analytics. It is an excellent article that actually investigates the issue rather than simply prints quotes from the marketing people of each vendor.

In the article, the most interesting claims are (1) video analytics can cost up to $100,000 USD per camera, (2) expect one false alarm per camera per hour and (3) that on a scale of 1 to 10, the difficulty of video analytics range from a 6 to an 11. A senior engineer from Adesta states that at first the difficulty of using video analytics was a 10 but after a few years of experience, it's now 'only' a 6 or 7.

How motivated will people be to buy video analytics whern they hear integrators say that it is extremely expensive, highly error prone and really hard to deploy?

Now, even I think these claims fall more on the worse case scenario and not realistic of the best that is available. However, it is very clear to see the level of problems that video analytics faces. I see no technical solution in the short term. What's scary to me is that most video analytic vendors are not even making claims anymore about how they are resolving this. Even the video analytic vendors tend to join the chorus of establishing 'lower expectations.'