Data Analytics is a hot area today. It applications across disciplines are manifold. The industry is building new tools and technologies around data analytics. Engineers are exploring ways to hone their skills in this area to progress in their careers. Whether it be vertical specific domains such as healthcare, e-commerce, transport, finance etc. or horizontal specific functions such as advertising, marketing, cross sales, data analytics is becoming a nucleus and a hub for businesses to leverage. While data analytics with its core principles of machine learning and un-learning is slowly stabilizing as a mature technology, it has a lot of scope to grow into. Trends suggest what new to watch for including newer concepts such as data lakes. An important piece in data analytics that is now taking shape is video analytics. Data is not purely the 2D data that we accumulate over time. Video data from varied video streams are gradually gaining prominence and with the right research in this space, the potential is huge. At this time, video analytics is popularly used in the surveillance systems. Players such as Intuit, Cisco have video analytics solutions and others such as HoneyWell include analytics as part of the hardware they sell. Newer partnerships are being announced by the day in the world of video analytics. Even in the space of surveillance, there is so much more opportunity to specialize which will help us build self-correcting societies and systems down the line. The global video analytics market report for 2015-20 has just been released covering a range of topics including application, tools, market size etc.
As an up and coming technology, video analytics will face hurdles and challenges – security and privacy of data especially when in a video format, where masking may not often be done, will be one of the main challenges to deal with. Also, given the size of the video sources, handling and discarding them through the right means is something to work through over time. Performance of analytics solutions will also not be easy given the humungous volumes of data that will need to be dealt with.
Looking at these as opportunities and not necessarily as challenges, if this is an area that you want to build an edge on, now is a great time to explore the overall package of video publishing, analytics, its applications and how they fit into the larger ecosystem of data analytics. The good news is that this market is no longer a landscape handled by a select few – a number of players are in, making this a survival of the fittest, also offering the end users, ample options to choose from.