IC Realtime


How 4K Makes Video AI Work Better | IC Realtime

Mike Ray | 2022-01-24

Artificial Intelligence is in the news every day - for good and sometimes as a threat. But at IC Realtime, we have put AI to work firmly on the side of the "good guys" with our new cameras & recorders that increasingly lean on AI for image processing & detection, and analysis.

IC Realtime's FlexSmartAI system has a wide range of capabilities that are shared & spread between cameras & recorders. They can deliver an amazing set of functions and are designed to work interactively with each other to accomplish their shared job of delivering the world's best video surveillance.

Pixels As Data Points

At the most basic level, the performance of every AI function is accomplished by detecting datapoints - in this case individual video pixels in discrete frames - and comparing them with the AI's built-in human-trained dataset. That dataset is informed & expanded by experience over time using machine deep-learning for increasing accuracy as it unblinkingly studies each frame.

Make no mistake, 4K monitors & TVs have built-in software that does a great job upscaling 1080P video streams and the edge averaging blur is virtually unnoticeable for entertainment viewing. And Pro-level 4K cameras like IC Realtime’s can be “dumbed down” to 1080P if needed until the rest of the system is upgraded. That extra resolution is lost, but the cameras still look good.

Watch The Stream & Follow The Rules

At the camera level, AI & algorithms (essentially calculations built on rules & ratios) adjust contrast, edge definition & detail rendition and study every frame for faces & vehicles and respond as instructed when they detect them. The AI oversees the video stream like a staff of security officers & engineers, and some models can even directly compute statistics from the video they observe. Once the camera AI has done its work, it then employs lossless H.265 & H.265+ compression to stream them to the recorder. There, a new & expanded set of AI processes deliver a whole range of additional data and perform a range of AI-based functions defined by each NVR or HDVR model's function set.

It’s also important to keep in mind that with a 4K security camera system, you are not just decoding a commercial provider’s pre-processed 4K signal like from your cable box. These are real-time, live frames being captured, processed, transmitted, recorded, displayed, and streamed - all at the same time inside your system. 4K video surveillance isn’t tweaked & packaged entertainment, it’s real-life with serious security purposes. So for video quality & dependability, having the right 4K video tools is important.

The Better The Info - The Better The Decisions

In all of these steps, the most basic quality & precision factor is the clarity of the camera sensor's digital output. The sharpness of edge definition and color/contrast the AI can provide depends on the quality and quantity of the data points it has to analyze an image frame. In a video camera, those all important data points are pixels.

Video Security is The Best Possible Use Of 4K

At 8,294,400 pixels, 4k video streams deliver 4X the data points of a 1080P camera for the AI to chew on & analyze. As anyone with even a passing familiarity with Excel graphs knows, the more data points, the smoother the curve and better the resultant information. Their color, contrast & position allows the AI to process the image they see in each frame, so the more of them in each frame, the better job it can do. That's where the amazing 3840 × 2160 pixel density of 4K is at its finest (no pun intended!) and why at IC Realtime we say video security is the best possible use of 4K.


Tags: 4k security cameras, 4k security system, 4k cameras, 4k video footage

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