Way-cool video analytics

2/12/2009 12:00 PM EST

Startup BriefCam has an amazing technology for summarizing surveillance recordings. The company claims their technology lets you review 24 hours of footage in as little as one minute. After viewing demos of their technology, their claim sounds completely plausible. Very impressive!

Here's how it works: Like most video analytics algorithms, BriefCam starts by identifying objects and activities in the recording. For example, it can track all cars and pedestrians in a scene. Then BriefCam does something different: It pulls the objects of interest out of the video and uses them to create a new synopsis video. This synopsis shows activities that occurred at different times as if they overlapped. The effect is hard to describe: It's like an extreme fast-forward, except that you can clearly see the interesting parts. You really have to watch the demo to see how it works—words don't do it justice.

I think this technology has a lot of potential. One of the big problems with surveillance is that nobody has time to review all the footage. BriefCam's technology is a rather clever solution to this problem.

Update: You can find even more demos—including some rather trippy demos—see The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where the technology was developed.