motion detection

What is a Video Search Engine? Part III – Detecting Motion

In Part I and II, we examined how we would be able to search Speech and Text inside videos. In Part III, we will look at one of the first names given to videos – “Motion” Picture. 

So, all videos have motion? That may not be true, not all videos have motion (or movement) all the time, especially in the case of security and surveillance videos.

video-search-engine-motion-detection.jpg

Detecting motion in videos enables you to efficiently identify sections of interest within an otherwise long and uneventful video. That might sound simple with a single video, but what if you have 10,000 hours of videos to review every night? That’s a near impossible task to eyeball every video minute.

Motion detection can be used on static camera footage to identify sections of the video where motion occurs.

  • Detect when motion has occurred in videos with stationery backgrounds
  • Eliminate false positives caused because of light changes, shadows, small insects, and others

While there are motion sensors that can detect motion real-time, these systems tend to be expensive. Thus, the reason why most of the CCTV surveillance systems only does recording at best. Therefore, there are many scenarios that does not require real-time motion detection, like detecting a car entering a bus lane during peak hours.

video search engine bus lane detection

Current technology has come to a point where it is able to differentiate between real motion (such as a person walking into a room), and false positives (such as leaves in the wind, along with shadow or light changes). This allows you to generate security alerts from camera feeds without being spammed with endless irrelevant events, while being able to extract moments of interest from extremely long surveillance videos.

To find out more about how you can detect motion inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

What is a Video Search Engine?

Let's dissect this into 2 parts - "Video" and "Search Engine". 

Starting with "Search Engine" first. We are so used to using search engines today that we do not really bother with how a search engine really works. And perhaps you shouldn't... why should you as long as the results are good. We normally start questioning (or complain) when the results are not what we expect it to be. 

So a good search engine should do a couple of things. It should (let's get a bit technical) have:

  • A good Indexing engine
  • Phrase matching
  • Smart Search result Summary 
  • Keyword highlighting
  • Stemming/Lemmas (Word form variations are searched and ranked lower)
  • Complex expression support; nested groups, partial matching, NOT, OR and AND
  • Multiple Format indexing
  • Unicode and non English language support

It all the above these parameters are measurable, you will be able to figure out if one engine is better than another. 

So the format that we want to search is "Video". Today, typical search engines can only search "Title" and "Metadata". Even if both "title" and "metadata" are well defined and representative of the video itself, what is missing is the content. Imagine you have a thousand page document and you can only search the document title and it's summary. That's the current state of affairs for video search. 

So of course the next question is what do you want to search from a "Video"? That's like opening Paradox's Box. Unlike a piece of document, video is multi-dimensional and contains a lot more information. For example, speech, words, people, objects, movement, colours, etc. 

Currently, many of these search technologies still do not exist or are barely in their infancy. What is available now, is just scratching the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, the real definition of what is a video search engine is currently evolving. 

At VideoSpace, we would like to define our version of VIdeo Search Engine. Where our VIdeo Search Engine is able to search six key areas:

  • Speech Recognition
  • Words (or Text)
  • Motion Detection
  • Facial Detection
  • Emotion Detection
  • Offensive Content Detection

Numbers reports say the same thing. By 2017, videos will account for more than 70% of all internet traffic. Imagine you have the ability to search videos in future. 

The VideoSpace Video Search Engine is taking the leap now.