"Agent Vi offers the most cost-effective and comprehensive VCA (video content analysis) solutions on the market today. The solutions are open platform, enabling customers to use the analytics with a variety of cameras and recording solutions, with minimum impact on the TCO.", said Mr. Ariel Frischoff, VP Sales, EMEA & APAC, Agent Vi on an exclusive interview given to Epicos.
1. Could you please describe the place of Agent Video Intelligence (Agent Vi) in the national and international market?
Agent Vi is positioned today as the global leader in video analytics solutions. This position is supported by Agent Vi’s open architecture approach, which makes it the ideal choice for many installations looking to boast best of breed solutions. Our comprehensive product offering, which extends from our award-wining real-time detection system to our newly released video forensic software, and our global reach through certified partners and distribution channels, leaves no doubt that Agent Vi is the leading player in the intelligent video market.
2. Why someone should choose Agent Vi to do business?
Agent Vi offers the most cost-effective and comprehensive VCA (video content analysis) solutions on the market today. The solutions are open platform, enabling customers to use the analytics with a variety of cameras and recording solutions, with minimum impact on the TCO. In addition, Agent Vi’s real-time analytics solution has been objectively verified, and is recognized by independent government agencies, such as the UK Home Office, which has approved Vi-System as a primary detection system for operational alert use under the i-LIDS program.
3. What are the main technological advantages of Agent Vi?
Agent Vi’s open platform supports the market-leading cameras and encoders, and a few dozen NVR and VMS solutions, making Agent Vi’s software an ideal option, no matter the existing infrastructure and equipment. Agent Vi also offers the lowest TCO due to the unique, patented system architecture, which enables VCA on an unlimited number of cameras with minimum hardware costs.
The solutions are also highly scalable – a server with a quad core processor can support up to 200 cameras running a variety of analytics tasks.
Furthermore, Agent Vi’s products are future-proof, meaning that new features developed on the server side do not require upgrading of edge device firmware when there is a new product version released, or when there is a need to add additional analytics functions to an edge device.
4. Is the company currently investing in a new technology?
Yes. Agent Vi continuously expands its offering by adding new capabilities and adding new items to its product portfolio. For example, with the recent launch of Vi-Search, Agent Vi now offers analytics capabilities for recorded video, and not just for real-time video. This marks a paradigm shift in the video analytics market which has traditionally focused on real-time applications.
5. In which sectors of everyday life is Agent Vi activated?
Agent Vi’s products are deployed the world over, across many different vertical markets. Main focus markets include transportation (airports and seaports, railways, traffic), city surveillance, enterprise surveillance and retail/business intelligence applications. Recent projects have included the provision of over 1,000 analytics channels to a major Far East subway system, an installation to protect the facilities of the largest metropolitan public transportation company in Italy, over 400 channels at a leading IT enterprise in India, over 430 channels for real-time detection across high speed train lines in China, and more.
6. Could you please describe us the main products that Agent Vi is producing? What are the main characteristics of them?
Vi-System is Agent Vi’s real-time detection and alert software, transforming standard surveillance networks into intelligent and effective detection and alert systems. By performing real-time analysis of the video stream, Vi-System identifies and generates alerts for a variety of user-defined events relating to people, vehicles and objects. Accordingly, Vi-System is used for a range of applications including security and perimeter protection, safety, traffic monitoring, asset protection and business intelligence.
For example, rather than relying on a security guard to pick up a suspicious incident by watching multiple camera screens, Vi-System can alert the security team to a suspicious object left on a train platform, a car stopped in a no-stopping zone and posing a safety risk, a person breaching the perimeter of a facility, or entering a secure zone that is off-limits, and can even alert to the removal of a valuable asset (for example, theft of a painting or a sculpture from a museum).
Vi-Search, Agent Vi’s newest product, has a totally different focus – stored video, rather than real-time video stream. In the past, we have seen incidents (for example, the London subway attack) whereby following the incident the police called in reinforcements to sit and review hours upon hours of stored video in order to identify specific people, vehicles etc. Vi-Search overcomes this tedious manual review process, and enables automatic and effortless retrieval of information contained in the stored video. It offers an extensive set of intuitive search parameters, (which do not have to be defined in advance), including target type (person, vehicle, object), event type (moving, stationary, crossing a line etc), search by color and size, search within specific time frames or on specific cameras, and more.
Vi-Search offers a range of business intelligence capabilities that are particularly relevant to the retail sector, such as measuring store traffic, identifying traffic paths and high density areas, measuring dwell time, and more. These capabilities are an excellent tool to inform decisions about merchandising, marketing and operations, including understanding where to place products for premium positioning in the store, or how many staff to allocate to different areas, and where to place them in line with store traffic trends.