Center for CCTV Research aims to facilitate India's CCTV journey to global levels

How much have CCTVs changed our lives over a period of time from the 90s onward? It would be very difficult to decide! How much computer vision makes a difference in our lives? What is the mammoth difference between what CCTVs could do a decade back and what it does today?

From immigration to fire to accidents to crime detection to crowding to managing objects to geofencing, and to managing emergency governance and natural calamities. We are moving in a world where we have a proven capacity to see, while not being there.

If we add analytics to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), we are transformed into a different world. Nonetheless, the quality of CCTVs projects has not changed in the manner technology has faced exponential challenges at the same time vulnerabilities too have thrown up another challenge.

From requirement gathering to technical specifications to integration, are still a way off from being seamless. Every single project is an art in the great Indian Jugaad school of technology and management. With easing the load and friction of the project on its critical stakeholders, the Center for CCTV Research, a multistakeholder research facility was created in February 2021 and is doing yeomen service to its cause, with experiments, projects, and research.

Now the thought process which has evolved is, what if we had an open-air real-life scenario laboratory, where everything from camera specification, bandwidth, picture quality, command centre, analytics, intelligent video management, and API integration would be up on display?

Set up on the campus of RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, this laboratory would double up as the ‘Video Command Center' and all the convergence, control, and intelligence would happen here. This can be built after taking into consideration the current conventional and cutting-edge requirements in this field.

End-to-end all elements of the complete systems would be available, on display, fully functional and the resources of the laboratory and center would guide you and mentor you, for whatever you needed in this field. You could be a camera buyer or seller, a researcher or a consultant, etc, this laboratory would fulfill all your needs. On the documentation side too, everybody would be available to bring you to a plug and play stage, in no time.

If there is a specific need, which is not available in the laboratory, we would create a scenario of that nature and deliver it. There would be a need to test lots of things; for specs, compute, analytics and scale, and also many things that would be integrated for the first time, for ex-facial recognition with automated number plate recognition with any type of access control.

The research on the nature of data, its analytics and the intelligence coming side by side of the video, can provide another higher-level dimension to its utility. Integration of footage from the drones could be another value-add, which can be used for a vast variety of requirements. CCTV is still in a nascent stage in this country and this laboratory and the centre would facilitate its journey to the global levels.

Laboratories create the world; functional R&D for extraordinary results.

Blog by- Dr. Parvez Hayat Former IPS