Organizations of every type and size are always looking to make more informed decisions. In order to do better and plan for the changing world, they want to have access to as much information as possible. And, rather than implementing a new information gathering system, many are looking to mine the data already being collected by their physical security systems.

But it’s not enough to simply access this data. You need to make sense of it, and that’s where video analytics comes in. In general, analytics tools take large amounts of unstructured data and structure it to allow you to unlock its value. When you are able to correlate and extract information, you can gain all manner of insight into your business and environment.

Video analytics has been part of security systems for 10 to 15 years. Traditionally, security departments used video analytics as a reactive tool that could detect something in a live video stream and then create an event that operators could respond to. But, organizations have come to realize that you can use video, access control and license plate recognition for more than surveillance.

Since then, video analytics has evolved considerably in terms of analyzing data with new algorithms that are able to extract information from video streams. In addition, with advancements in hardware, we can now leverage more computing power to extract very reliable data from our video streams.

And the industry itself is getting better at presenting the mined data in more consumable ways. We’re seeing a more end-user-oriented approach towards the development of systems. Instead of just providing all the data that is available, solution providers are looking at what users actually need and how to present that information in the clearest possible way.

With all these advancements, organizations can now structure their data to optimize resources and to make better business decisions. Currently, there are three verticals where video analytics are already having a huge impact: retail, airports and traffic.