Overcome the Challenges of Airport Surveillance Security

Security has evolved into a central focus of the transit experience. For airports especially, it has pervaded all aspects of flight travel from takeoff to touchdown, entering the airport grounds and collecting one’s bag before continuing on. Facilitating this broad security coverage and response enablement, video surveillance is key for actively monitoring airports, including the terminal floors, checkpoints, parking lots and runways.

Video surveillance is necessary for overseeing and securing airports; however, it is a somewhat inefficient method of ensuring public safety. Realistically, security operators cannot actively focus on video feeds for hours at a time. It is easy – and human – for one’s attention to wander or to become distracted, thereby overlooking or failing to detect misbehavior or its indicators. Even the most attentive monitors can easily miss critical activity in video, dismiss something as trivial or misinterpret something as innocuous. Sometimes, vital evidence captured on video is not even detectable by the human eye.

According to the Seagate Video Surveillance Trend Report, organizations typically implement hundreds of surveillance cameras and 88 percent of cameras record footage non-stop 24 hours a day. Reviewing such volumes of video is an overwhelming challenge that requires significant manpower and time. When investigating an incident in its aftermath, airports have to weigh the cost benefit of manually reviewing enormous quantities of footage or relinquishing valuable evidence in the interests of managing time and resources effectively.

Today, artificial intelligence and data-driven technology is enabling airports to address their security surveillance challenges. Video Content Analytics (VCA) technology, for instance, enables airports to accelerate video investigations, extend situational awareness and even derive operational intelligence from video data. Read on to understand how video analytics is enabling airports to overcome surveillance challenges, optimize airport security and operations and maximize the value of video for airports beyond security.

Optimizing Airport Security with Video Content Analytics

A Video Content Analytics system is an AI-backed technology that relies on Machine Learning techniques to train software to consistently and accurately detect objects in video. The detected objects are extracted and identified and then classified based on an analysis of their behaviors and attributes. Once the video data is structured and identified, it can be used for intelligent decision making and security enablement.

By indexing and organizing video data based on attributes and classifications, video analytics solutions make video data easier to digest. When security personnel has little direction guiding their investigation, having a structured information database enables them to comprehensively and quickly understand what occurred. In cases where a suspect has been identified, operators can quickly filter their video search based on known characteristics and accelerate investigations by eliminating from the search all irrelevant objects.

Once structured, video data also can reveal patterns, and the VCA system can recognize trends and detect anomalies, such as suspicious behavior. In real-time scenarios, airport security can configure alerts so that a call to action is triggered whenever unusual or illicit behavior is detected. This enables faster response to threats and emergencies than traditional surveillance, in which a human monitor would have to notice the anomalous behavior and react quickly. For instance, for sensitive areas or entryways in an airport, security can configure alerting to discover when someone is dwelling or entering, and determine whether the behavior is malicious and warrants immediate reaction. While no analytics system can predict a security breach or crisis, a thorough, intelligence-based understanding of normal behavior can help minimize the impact of unforeseen events and accelerate response.

Offering access and analysis of video surveillance data, video analytics also helps airports manage their security protocols and staff more efficiently. Security checkpoints at airports are typically the cause of major bottlenecks in airport traffic. While ensuring public safety is a top priority, streamlining the security experience is critical for airports and drives visitor satisfaction. Analyzing video coverage of an airport security checkpoint, management can evaluate the different lines at the checkpoint and determine whether traffic is moving through at the same pace or whether travelers are being directed to security lines proportionately. They can uncover trends about security staffing, peak hours and more, and make sure visitors are benefiting from security checks that are both thorough and efficient.

Streamlining Airport Operations and Business Performance

Traffic optimization and insight contributes to far more than airport security. Having a clear and deep understanding of airport traffic flow patterns is important for effectively managing airport functions from on-site businesses to ground transportation and parking. A video analytics platform can help airports track and control traffic from the parking lots to the check-in lobbies, security checkpoints, terminal floors, flight gates and beyond. All these spaces are monitored by video surveillance, and, by collecting, aggregating and analyzing the video data, airports can effectively manage daily traffic and plan ahead for high traffic situations, understanding trends.

Extensive campuses, airports have internal roads and transportation services, which connect to main highways. They receive multiple freight and service deliveries around the clock, which also contributes to congested roads. Shuttles, buses and train lines must be coordinated with the local public transportation options, flight times and vehicular and human traffic patterns. Video intelligence can help inform these efforts and streamline transportation services within the airport. For people within the airport, it can point to problem hotspots and causes for overcrowding, enabling airports to improve throughput based on actionable data intelligence, respond proactively when crowds start to form and predictively hire and position staff to meet fluctuations in traffic influx.

When airports expand, this data can also be used to inform floor planning of the new terminal based on insights about traveler navigation patterns, security checkpoint behaviors, interactions at retail shops and more. The same data can also help airports be more energy efficient: understanding where traffic converges and when, airports can ensure that lighting, heating and cooling and electricity, in general, is being used as needed and not wasted. Airports can even maximize staffing assignments, by using video analytics to identify inefficiencies and gaps in staffing, from maintenance workers to security guards and airline support staff.

Maximizing the Value of Video for Airports

Video analytics enable airports to leverage their existing security infrastructure beyond public safety, to extract business intelligence for driving significant operational and commercial productivity. In addition to the benefits of improving staff performance and streamlining visitor traffic flows, airports can use video data to power better decision-making, merchandising strategies, floor plan optimization and more.

Part of managing an airport is managing an extensive campus, filled with food vendors, retail businesses and other shops. Airports can support their on-site businesses by sharing video data intelligence to help these vendors maximize their sales and visitor traffic. Understanding where consumers and visitors dwell or enter can help shop owners understand the effectiveness of their advertising and display configurations, the invitingness of their store and how they can drive more business. The airport can also use this data when renting or selling real-estate within the terminal, to demonstrate the value of the different shop spaces and offer fair pricing for the space that benefits both the vendor and the airport. Furthermore, the airport can integrate traffic data with airline scheduling data, and assign flight gates based on the likelihood of a delay or cancellation, so that flyers who have an extended layover are based in areas with easy access to food, entertainment and shopping.

Integrating video data with intelligence from other sensors – a practice called Data Fusion – the airport can leverage comprehensive data insights for more complex business applications. For instance, Point of Sale (POS) data from a restaurant, shop or vendor can be integrated with video analytics traffic and dwell data to derive critical insight. Imagine a Duty Free shop with surveillance cameras installed around the entrances. Based on the fused data, the manager can determine factors such as: How many people entered the shop per hour? Of that number, how many entrances resulted in sales? If there is a large gap between entry rates and conversion results, the retailer can use the integrated intelligence to understand why this was the case. Were shoppers dwelling at displays but not buying? If so, was this because of pricing or other considerations, such as needing to catch a flight or long checkout lines?

Retailers can leverage this video data to understand how many passersby considered entering the store, or dwelled at the entrance, but did not actually walk in. They can then develop strategies to drive store entries and, ultimately, purchases. With comprehensive and extensive data, airports can drive better business performance and inform intelligent decision making processes.

The AI-Backed Airport is Ready for Take Off

Today’s technology developments are optimizing the travel experiences of tomorrow. With artificial intelligence, airports can take existing infrastructure and sensors and transform these tools into actionable insight for enhancing security, management and operations – and, ultimately, the airport’s bottom line. Solutions such as video analytics are continuously evolving to further enable safety, security and productivity, extending the value of video surveillance and helping to overcome its challenges. Face recognition, for instance, is an emerging technology that could become central to airport security and operations. Some airports have integrated biometric solutions for enabling identification and access control. With legal and privacy regulation still in flux, the full capabilities and possibilities for this technology at airports has yet to be realized. That being said, to remain competitive and effective, airports need to be aware of the cutting-edge of technological solutions available to them, integrate systems that drive efficiency and productivity and embrace new ways of engaging and addressing the needs of travelers – video analytics is only the beginning.

Stephanie Weagle is the Chief Marketing Officer at BriefCam, the industry’s leading provider of Video Synopsis® and Deep Learning solutions for rapid video review and search, face recognition, real-time alerting and quantitative video insights. Stephanie leads the company’s global marketing initiatives, accelerating market adoption of BriefCam’s comprehensive video analytics solutions. Before joining BriefCam, Stephanie was Vice President of Marketing for Corero Network Security, where she led global marketing for the company’s cyber-threat mitigation product portfolio. Previously, Stephanie held senior marketing roles at Lionbridge Technologies and Novell, Inc.