Understanding the technology
Understanding CCTV analytics: what it can — and cannot — do
AI video analytics can help teams review selected events faster, but results depend on camera quality, placement, lighting, movement, network conditions and the use case being configured. A site assessment is the best way to understand what is suitable for your environment.
About the visuals on this page. Everything below is illustrative. The films are reference footage published by Spot AI, another company in this field; any interface or automated action shown is theirs, not a demonstration of PGAK. To see PGAK’s own recordings, each with the conditions it was captured under, go to our own work on the homepage.
What the idea looks like
Three short, silent films. They are here to explain a category of technology, not to show a result on anybody’s site.
What the results actually depend on
These are the six things we check at an assessment, in roughly the order they decide the outcome.
Camera position
Height, angle and distance decide what is even in frame. Most disappointing results are a mounting problem, not a model problem.
Image quality
Resolution at the subject, not at the sensor. A 4MP camera thirty metres from a gate is a low-resolution camera at that gate.
Lighting
Including how it changes. A view that works at 11am can be unusable at 6pm against the same sun.
Movement and occlusion
People and vehicles that pass behind racking, pillars or each other are harder to track continuously.
Network and recording
Stream access, bandwidth and retention decide what can be processed and what can be reviewed afterwards.
The configured use case
A model tuned to count a known item across a line is not the same as one asked to judge behaviour.
What it cannot do
Worth reading before you compare quotations. A supplier who will not put this list in writing is not offering you a better product.
- Guarantee that nothing is missed. Every analytics configuration has a false-negative rate, and any supplier who says otherwise has not measured it.
- Make a badly placed camera work. Software cannot recover a view the lens never captured.
- Identify intent. A system can flag that a person is in a zone at an unusual hour. It cannot tell you why.
- Replace a response process. An alert nobody is assigned to act on is a notification, not security.
- Produce the same accuracy on every site. Results depend on the conditions above, which is why we assess before quoting.