HERZLIYA, Israel--Intelligent video appliance manufacturer ioimage announced in April that it was leveraging its video analytics technology to expand into the remote video monitoring (RVM) market in Europe and beyond.

The company made the decision to dive headlong into RVM upon realizing the significant growth opportunities in the sector, according to ioimage's EMEA sales director Greg Mendeleev. "Several companies were coming to us to discuss this, and we realized this was an area where customers had a need and we could provide exactly what they needed," said Mendeleev.

Aided by the fact that several people in the company had backgrounds in RVM, ioimage undertook a year's worth of research to look into the RVM market both in Europe and the rest of the world. "What we found was that it really all comes down to two things: time and everything that has to do with operators and efficiency," said Mendeleev. "Together, these two factors can improve ROI or factor ROI to [monitoring] companies."

Mendeleev said he's met with upwards of 20 monitoring centers around Europe, primarily in the UK, Holland, Spain and Germany, and what he found was that many of them often rely on infrared technology and were having issues with false alarms. With its analytics capabilities, Mendeleev said ioimage felt it could help monitoring centers significantly reduce false alarms often generated by things like small animals, wind-blown debris, rain or other climate conditions, and also increase operational efficiency.

When it comes to efficiency, Mendeleev said that ioimage's analytics capabilities really deliver in terms of helping an operator quickly verify an alarm. "What causes an alarm is immediately shown in a bounding box, so operators can see what's happening," said Mendeleev. On the other hand, with active or passive infrared (PIR) detectors it's often unclear what's generating an alarm, and even if it's complemented with a camera, operators have to spend valuable time searching and rewinding footage to understand what has happened. For monitoring centers this means reduced stress and strain on operators, opening the way to being able to add more clients, according to Mendeleev. "The bottom line is faster response times and the ability to take on more clients."

SureView Systems, a maker of software for central monitoring stations that's active in both Europe and the U.S., has partnered with ioimage and is convinced of the benefits analytics bring to monitoring centers. "Outdoor motion detection can be problematic in producing unwanted false alarm traffic," said SureView vice president Matt Krebs. "The ioimage video analytics has proven to be very reliable and effective in generating useful alarm event notification. By pairing it with our Immix software and combining an alert with video during an event, central station operators are made more situation-aware."

According to Mendeleev, monitoring centers that deploy analytics are often able to drum up more business by impressing clients with the benefits of the technology. "From talking to monitoring centers, we've found that a lot of them want to present themselves as more advanced," said Mendeleev. "If everyone else is using PIR or other sensors, video analytics offer a way of differentiating themselves. It's perception, but it's important."