20 years of Evolution in Cognitech VideoActive: From Patented Lossless Video Acquisition to Patented Automatic Video Sorting, Searching, and Indexing

Here is the next part of the previous blog series, Thanks again for reading the blog… 

ForensicFriday

ForensicFriday

Continuing with our previous discussion on the pioneering technological breakthrough achieved by developing Cognitech VideoActive, the session aims to explain the essential features of this  Real-Time Video Forensics Software as wells as Crime Scene Reconstruction Software.

 

With the exponentially increased use of CCTV cameras across all functions and departments, it becomes difficult for the security personnel to monitor and ascertain the situation distributed through multiple cameras accurately. This is where Real-Time video analysis finds its natural use.

Patented Automatic Demultiplexing 

Another application that is naturally suited for Real-Time implementation is Demultiplexing, which converts intertwined multiple camera video source streams, such as multiplexed CCTV footage, into individual digital camera channels that can be stored, processed or viewed, individually or together. The multiplexed videos are still to be found with the analog recording system. Automatic demultiplexing intelligently determine how to separate demultiplexed frames into individual camera channels with no human interaction for any number of channels. Manual demultiplexing, on the other hand,  sorts demultiplexed video according to user-defined key-frames.

 

The first-ever scientific publication on Demultiplexing and specifically Automatic Demultiplexing through algorithm was published by Cognitech’s scientists: “Software-based universal demultiplexing: threshold-free energy minimization approach

Author(s): Frederic Guichard; Alexander Litz; Lenny I. Rudin; Ping Yu

2001, SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4232 Conference on

Enabling Technologies for Law Enforcement and Security, 

 

The original idea of Automatic Demultiplexing was to compare the streaming video frames and group them accordingly to similarity criteria. These similarity criteria can be as simple as correlation measure between frames, which assumes that frames do mot have dynamic changes, like moving vehicles or walking people.

Cognitech scientists improved the demultiplexing algorithm further to account for scenes with constant changes present, like casino floor and freeway traffic (published in Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, 2005. AVSS 2005. IEEE Conference

“Meaningful automatic video demultiplexing with unknown number of cameras, contrast changes, and motion.”Jose Luis Lisani, Lenny Rudin, Pascal Monasse, Jean-Michel Morel, Ping Yu)

United States Patent Office has awarded Cognitech US Patent #820059 L. Rudin et. Al.

Video demultiplexing based on meaningful modes extraction” for an algorithm that is the basis of the Cognitech VideoActive Demultiplexing module, the most robust proprietary Demultiplexing software on the market.

Fast forward to 2019. Cognitech scientists have been extending the earlier methods for Automatic Demultiplexing to such important tasks as Video Search,  and Sort and Indexing.

 

If the camera is PTZ, it is necessary to be able to group frames that do not even have the same content, but ‘linked’ spatially:

Once one or several of the video are Demultiplexed, the end-user can view these sorted camera feeds through Cognitech Video Investigator’s VSI Interface. VSI is a Video Scene Integrator, a specialized Video Forensics Software that is organizing CCTV to facilitate the investigation process of videos from multiple cameras, usually adjacent in space and time, like tracking the suspects that enters the department store and walks across areas covered by different cameras.

Manual tools are eventually to be supplemented by automatic Tracking and Video Search Tools. US Patent Office has awarded Cognitech a very versatile US Patent to Cognitech: L. Rudin et. Al.” System and method for image and video search, indexing and object classification” US Patent number: 8831357

These are also naturally Real-Time applications. For example, one may need to detect in the hours-long video each individual using an automated teller machine, assign this person an index, and store all indexed individuals into a database for subsequent retrieving based on attributes such as human height ( with automatic crime scene measurement tools).  Similarly, the passing by vehicles can be detected, indexed, and stored. Moreover, identifying attributes can also be extracted, such as vehicle color, dimensions and eventually Make and Model, a good application of video forensics analysis software.

 

Talk with experts for Forensic Video Processing Software and Forensic Image Processing Software solutions. Contact Cognitech!

We hope you enjoyed this CogniKnowledge Blog! Stay tuned and don’t miss the next blogs. You can also follow us on TwitterFacebookInstagramLinkedIn, or YouTube: we post CogniKnowledge Blogs and ForensicFriday Blogs regularly so you won’t miss any!

20 years of Evolution in Cognitech VideoActive: Patented Lossless Video Acquisition to Patented 3D Model to Video Fusion for Measurements and Identification

Hola, … thanks for reading our blog series.

Today is Friday, oh yeah. We call ForensicFriday! Happy ForensicFriday!!

ForensicFriday

ForensicFriday

This blog topic aims to enumerate the technological advancement in Cognitech Video Active software achieved since its introduction in the early 2000’s as the first-ever Real-Time Forensic Video Processing software, and the US Patented technological advances from its inception to now. There are many unique features that have been developed, which makes it one of the most preferred Real-Time Modular software for Video Forensics applications.

  • Modular Interface for Video Forensics

Cognitech’s VideoActive’s revolutionary modular design at its inception, allows the end-user to choose a pre-defined configuration or user-defined signal processing chain resulting in developing a best-in-class Reconfigurable Work Flow in Forensic Video analysis software. Also, this can be easily combined to produce a user-defined processing pipeline from live sources, remote Cloud streaming storage or locally stored files, all in real-time.

Modular Interface for Video Forensics

Modular Interface for Video Forensics

  • Patented Compact Lossless Video Capture

Video Capture is obviously the basic  Real-Time task that comes to mind.  It was clear from our start in 1988 that the task of digital video acquisition for the subsequent Forensic Video Enhancement had to satisfy the Lossless capture condition to be used as video enhancement software with no compression artifacts. There were only a few very expensive hardware solutions at the time to achieve this condition. The problem was the data transfer rate bandwidth. We roughly needed 20 Mb/sec data to be transferred to a hard disc. But at the time, only expensive RAM could sustain such speeds, and RAM size could fit at most only a few minutes of uncompressed video.

Cognitech’s revolutionary Solution: VideoActive software that provides real-time lossless capture with US Patented VideoZip Encoding: “Lossless video data compressor with very high data rate” Cognitech’s US Patent # 95258

Not only we were then able to use inexpensive video capturing hardware ( which we designed) to capture video directly to the hard disc, but we also achieved great savings by occupying only half or less of pricy hard disc space by using a clever Cognitech patented method to Compact bytes of digital video into smaller Encoded Units. All of that is done in Real-Time, with no need for data buffering into large RAM or lossy compression. The more things change, the more the same problems surface. Today, the hard disc space cost is much cheaper than it was ten-twenty years ago. However, the lossless video storage size needs to be grown even faster with 4K+ video, massive video data streams. Cognitech continues to innovate its Lossless Video Encoding technology and more US Patents were awarded or are in a pipeline ( we will have it covered in some future Blog topic). The more sophisticated and computationally complex our data Encoding algorithms become, the more computationally advanced the Cognitech Video Active software has become. That includes the latest advances in parallel computing taking advantage of multi-GPU graphics cards and redesigning our Patented algorithms to take advantage of these parallel architecture. That is what makes Cognitech technology and its unique in this field top Caltech Ph.D. team stand out: No off-the-shelf algorithms as used by the competition.

Empowering video enhancement software with the latest computer science advances in parallel GPU computing makes end-users, Super-Users.

Talk with experts for Forensic Video Processing Software and Forensic Image Processing Software solutions. Contact Cognitech!

We hope you enjoyed this CogniKnowledge Blog! Stay tuned and don’t miss the next blogs. You can also follow us on TwitterFacebookInstagramLinkedIn, or YouTube: we post CogniKnowledge Blogs and ForensicFriday Blogs regularly so you won’t miss any!