“Axis makes city management safe and seamless,”Sudhindra Holla, Axis Communications

In an exclusive conversation with PCQuest, Sudhindra Holla, Sales Director – India & SAARC, Axis Communications, talks about how security has helped decrease crime rates in the country.

How the security has helped decrease the crime rates in the city?

Security and surveillance are an integral part of all societies. With the government’s smart city projects gaining momentum, there is a dire need of new age IP Video integrated end to end solutions to deliver high business value. Axis has been working closely with different cities in India. Its surveillance solutions have been deployed across the city of Bhavnagar, Kolhapur, Junagadh and Nanded.

The solutions have been extremely effective for traffic management in the city, identifying criminals and crowd management in pilgrims or tourist places. It has helped law enforcement authorities to real-time tracking of crimes and has enabled better governance and civic administration.

The recent community CCTV Nenu Saitham project in Hyderabad City Command has been proactive in adopting a one-of-its-kind smart surveillance implementation. This will track, monitor and analyse the video feed for detecting criminal activities, traffic violations and road conditions in real time. The Government after seeing a drop in the overall crime rate post implementation of CCTV have decided to invest 15 lakh cameras across the state in the next three years.

What is the importance of video analytics?

Video surveillance systems produce massive amounts of video. Due to lack of time or resources,
most of this video never gets watched or reviewed. As a result, security incidents get missed and suspicious behaviour is not detected in time to prevent unfortunate incidents. These challenges have played a large part in the development of video analytics.

Video analytics are software applications that automatically generate descriptions of what is happening in the video, which can be used to track persons, cars and other objects detected in the video stream, as well as their appearance and movements. This information can then be used as the basis on which to perform actions, e.g. to notify security personnel, or to record the incident. Video analytics offer many benefits, such as:

Cost savings - less video sent over the network reduces the network load and storage requirements.

Time savings - monitoring and searches in recorded video become easier, allowing operators to
manage more cameras.

Greater efficiency - automatically monitoring video for security incidents helps prevent crime,
rather than simply reacting after the event.

Creation of business value - integrating video data into other systems, such as headcounts from entrance cameras in retail stores, means the surveillance system can contribute insights and new solutions for other business functions.

Since no dedicated servers are required for video analytics, infrastructure cost is reduced. This is so
because no separate system is used along with Axis’ surveillance system. Hence, the analytics feed can be used to trigger IP audio to make important notifications in different scenarios like retail or critical infrastructure.

According to you, what are the security concerns in the country and how does Axis communication help customers address these concerns? From congestion and stopped vehicles to serious accidents and extreme weather, everyday traffic management is the biggest challenge. Criminal Activities
and traffic violation is also part of everyday traffic management.

Another challenge is the evolution of smart transportation. The biggest threat of entering a smart transportation era is the increased level of cyber threat. Expansion of digital architectures creates more areas of vulnerabilities since it is an interconnected system and could suffer from cyber-attacks, if not properly secured. This could affect public safety services, disrupt data records and shake the confidence of citizens.

The blurring boundaries between private and public companies could only accentuate the risks of attacks, which may affect smart cities at large. Due to the partnerships, there is a greater possibility that the private companies may try to embezzle or misuse some of the public-sector information as they gain access to them. In India, another threat that the smart transportation sector faces are that of National highway security.

Since there are many cross-city road travels, road safety should extend beyond the limitations of the smart ‘city’. Surveillance installations on the highways between cities is a national priority in India securing states on the borders.

Axis offers smart network video solutions addressing all these challenges making the city management seamless. Some of the technologies offered by Axis include:

Lightfinder – Axis Lightfinder technology can give more life-like colours in low-light conditions and helps to reduce the noise reduction as compared with any surveillance camera on the market.

Thermal Imaging - It captures images based solely on the heat radiating from people and objects; they are even unaffected by darkness or poor visibility. They also support intelligent analytics which analyzes detected incidents, automatically dismiss non-threatening ones, and immediately notify security of critical situations.

Zipstream - Axis Zipstream technology preserves all the important forensic detail you need while
lowering bandwidth and storage requirements by an average of 50% or more. Unlike most compression technology, Zipstream doesn’t just limit bitrate. Instead, three kinds of intelligent algorithms ensure that relevant forensic information is identified, recorded and sent in full resolution and at a full frame rate.