Ava Aware 3.1: Heatmaps power-up your video security insights

New month, new Ava release! Aware 3.1 brings exciting video analytics features that will help redefine the way you visualize people and vehicle flows. With heatmaps added to their video security system, organizations can understand high and low movement areas, dwell times, and people and vehicle traffic statistics.

Additionally, with the new release you will be able to:

• improve search accuracy with the exclusion of stationary objects in appearance rules
• detect smoke alarm alerts from Ava Cameras 
• create snapshots of people or vehicles of interest from video feeds
• create and send links when rules trigger Aware notifications

Heatmaps offer high-level visualizations for selected periods in locations with high activity from your cameras’ feeds. When enabled, heatmaps add an extra layer of information where people or vehicles have been over the selected time. Areas with no traffic show as the standard video stream, whereas areas with traffic show with a transparent colored mask, with the least traffic showing in purple and blue, moving to areas with the most traffic showing in the red spectrum.

Heatmaps are particularly useful in retail, healthcare, schools and other educational facilities, public venues, hospitality locales, public transport, or federal government premises. The tool provides an enhanced awareness of customer behavior, dwell times and congestions, transportation flows, suspicious activities, and more. 

To counteract some of the challenges caused by COVID-19, organizations can leverage heatmaps to better plan and optimize their spaces to protect people from unnecessary exposure. In combining heatmaps, occupancy counting, live tracking, rules-based notifications, and contact tracing, businesses can expand the applications of their existing Ava video security solutions to meet public safety regulations.

Map view allows users to view objects in a specific area of the locations you monitor. It combines floor plans or satellite images, existing cameras--which, by the way, can be Ava devices or 3rd party cameras--covering specific areas, the location of fire detectors and extinguishers, emergency exits, and any information that is vital to operators. 

Map view already harnessed the power of our counting, people and vehicle dots, timeline views, the paths of people to help operators gain a complete overview of locations. Now they can also display heatmap information. Users can select to view the data for a  configurable window between 1 and 24 hours. As they move to a different point in the timeline, the heatmap updates to show the corresponding data allowing them to see trends and compare different times or days.

Visit Ava Docs to learn more about how to enable heatmaps in Map view. 

Video view comes with a layout where users can drag and drop camera different camera feeds onto and create preferred views and custom arrangements. It uses Spotlight, a technology that automatically rotates the preferred views depending on what’s interesting or unusual in the feeds.

When enabled, each camera view displays the heatmap of people or vehicles over the selected time window. This is possible both for live video and historic video when in playback mode. To find out more about how to use heatmaps in Video view, check out our Docs portal.

We take feedback seriously.  After customers told us that they needed a faster way to share suspicious activity images with team members, we rolled our sleeves and made it possible to capture snapshots straight from live video feeds. 

For example, after taking a snapshot of a person or vehicle of interest, users can share that image with other people via email, or other messaging tools. Security professionals might also want to capture a snapshot of the view when setting up a camera, for reference in the event of needing to replace the camera at a later date.

Snapshots can be captured from live and playback feeds in Video view and from the Devices side panel.

Aware already had a feature allowing users to share video clips with people that were not users of the system. This worked by creating a link that could then be shared via email or messaging solutions. Anyone with this link could then view the specific video that had been shared with them. This allowed footage of incidents to be shared with people who would not normally be able to log into the system.

With the 3.1 release, this functionality has been extended to allow this link to be automatically created when a rule is triggered. The link itself can then automatically be embedded in the email or webhook actions of the rule so that external agencies can be alerted and can view the video of the event without any manual intervention.

Our Ava Cameras are learning continuously. Now, they have improved their audio detection to include smoke alarms. Our smoke alarm detection is tuned specifically to this type of noise.

Discover all the features included in Aware 3.1 from our release notes.