Video analytics market poised for growth

DALLAS—The North American market is, and will remain, the largest segment of the global video analytics market from 2015 to 2020 as the market grows worldwide. Cloud integration is a key trend and, while business intelligence is a rising application, security and life safety remains the top application for video analytics.

“We estimated that in 2020 the total video analytics market size, globally, would be $3.9 billion,” Marketsandmarkets research analyst Dheeraj Katkar told Security Systems News. Marketsandmarkets valued the global market at $1.53 billion in 2015—making the CAGR for this period 20.9 percent.

Katkar estimated that North America currently has 40- to 50 percent of the market. He believes the North American marketshare will decline a bit in the next five years, “but it will still be the major market share holder.”

The North American market's total value will be $710 million in 2015, Katkar said, growing to $1.7 billion by 2020 with a CAGR close to 19 percent.

The report examined two types of video analytics: edge-based, which have analytics built into the camera, and server-based, where video is uploaded to a server and then analyzed.

“The most common approach is a hybrid approach, in which server-based as well as edge-based combinations are being used in different scenarios,” Katkar said. Edge-based analytics are more scalable, Katkar said, which is a main differentiator. Server-based analytics can generally house more features, he said.

Combining edge-based analytics with the cloud is “an upcoming trend in intelligent video analytics market,” Katkar said. “Cloud-based subscription services to leverage analytics to extract information from videos and images is a key growth area in the market.”

Video analytics, in addition to safety and security uses, is being used more for business intelligence, Katkar noted. Video analytics will be mostly used for security and life safety to 2020, he said.

Within the report, “Applications of video analytics technology [were] broadly classified into intrusion management, crowd management, situation indication, pattern recognition and others,” Shweta Girme, Marketsandmarkets research associate, told SSN in an email interview.

"Threat to civil infrastructure and urban security" is one of the drivers for this market, Katkar said, especially with a “prevention-focused approach.”

The upfront cost of analytics solutions is a possible challenge for the market. “Video analytics systems, [whether] server-based or edge-based, are inherently costly,” Katkar said. “Also, integration [and] upgrading of existing video surveillance solutions are costly.” Small-scale end users might avoid video analytics because of its price, he said.

Katkar said that false alarm management in video analytics needs to improve, as “each false alert necessitates human assessment increasing additional stress on the operational and system management.”

He listed Bosch, Cisco, Honeywell, NICE, Axis, IBM, Avigilon, Agent Video Intelligence, Intellivision and ObjectVideo as some of the notable manufacturers in this market.