The video analytics market will be worth £230 million in 2011, up 21% from 2010, according to a report from technology research firm ABI.
The technology, which automatically identifies people and objects in video content, has matured to point of practicality, ABI said, and is now winning business aboption.
Examples of applications of video analytics include recognising human faces in speeding cars, and tracking the way customers walk through shops. One company, called Shopper Tracker, uses a hacked Microsoft Kinetic to track customers through stores, recording which products and store areas are most popular.
ABI said that there is a shift towards video analytics being performed on edge devices (the routers and switches which link video cameras together), but that those devices were still limited in their digital signal processing power and the ability to run complex detection algorithms.
"The transition to edge-based analytics will be slow for the next three or four years with Intel-based systems maintaining their market share lead," the ABI report said, adding that "unresolved issues" were preventing cloud-based surveillance from taking off.
ABI’s security and ID analyst George Kraev said that growth in the video analytics market would continue past 2011, but at a slower pace. "The video analytics market is projected to grow a little over 2.5 times from 2011 to 2016, with the business intelligence type [of video analytics] reaching a 38.4% market penetration by 2016."
