Event cards created by an intelligent DVR can replace long-term archiving of video surveillance footage.

“The traditional DVR or NVR is largely dumb — it doesn’t know anything about the video it’s recording, so it has to treat all portions of the video equally,” explained Tim Ross, co-founder and executive vice president of 3VR Security Inc., San Francisco.

“3VR knows the moment in time you looked most clearly at one of the cameras, where the lighting was good, the angle was good, and what transaction data was being entered into the transaction management system,” Ross noted.

“What 3VR does is in addition to storing the video, we’re storing separately this event card with the most representative images, best shots of the face, transaction data, time and place,” he related. “We’ve retained all that information in high-resolution formats to enable you to be able to perform those types of investigations without making an investment in keeping the video around.”

The company estimates its SmartStorage system can reduce video storage requirements by up to 10 times because users can retain the event cards longer than they store the video.

“The event card is not really about compression. It’s about using analysis to find specific frames and leave them largely uncompressed.,” Ross maintained.

“We’re really looking at what are the images that are most representative,” he said.

An event card is created by the system at the moment a suspect action starts. The system replaces representative images as better ones become available. At the end of the event, the system chooses what is most representative of it to put on the event card including faces, movements, transactions, locations, time and date.

Dealers also can maintain a server farm for customers as a source of recurring revenue.