Creating a Safer Environment for Higher-Education Institutions

Using AI-powered video analytics solutions to better protect and enable students, faculty and staff

The last several years have seen a steady rise in on-campus crimes and incidents such as active-shooter situations, theft, vandalism, sexual assault and more. Unsurprisingly, this rise in crime has had a direct impact on college selection and enrollment. In fact, according to the Journal of College Admission, 70% of parents believed campus safety was critical in deciding a school.

As such, maintaining a high-level standard of safety and security at academic institutions should be a top priority amongst educators and university decision makers. As educational leaders and administrators continue to search for ways of making their academic environments more productive, security teams are proactively seeking solutions to better-protect students, staff and faculty members.

With more students now returning to campus in the post-COVID era, it is becoming increasingly necessary for educators to make their campuses feel safe from potential threats of violence, danger and crime. However, many institutions do not possess the personnel, financial resources or budgetary allocations necessary to properly safeguard their campuses.

At Vintra, we are very committed to the challenge of better protecting faculty, staff and the world’s next generation of leaders – and we believe that AI-powered video analytics can play a very important part in this effort.

Let’s review a few key areas in which smarter video analytics can play an important role in enhancing the security and safety standing of any college campus:

• Better management of blocklists and safelists. Video analytics, when enhanced with AI, can monitor hundreds or thousands of cameras in real time and produce alerts on specific persons of interest. With this information in hand, security staff can then pinpoint and identify potential threats often and early and react more efficiently. Vintra’s Re-ID technology utilizes a face, body or vehicle reference image, re-identifies that object across multiple cameras to quickly provide security teams with a heightened level of situational awareness regarding a potential issue – all while doing so in a privacy-protected fashion. In addition, our Live Re-ID technology also features the ability to alert users as to the last known position of that object of interest, providing the location of potential threats in real time when it matters most
• Maximizing safety and security resources. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the physical security space in recent years, with all types of industries having difficulties in hiring and maintaining trained guard staff. The nation is currently experiencing a profound security-guard shortage and 34% of security professionals have experienced turnover as a direct result of COVID-19. Think of Vintra’s AI-powered video analytics as a 24×7 guard. One that never sleeps, needs a break, never takes vacation and whose eyes never tire of staring at screen after screen of video content. Vintra makes all video searchable, allowing users to find relevant footage when they have less information and would need to go through hours or days of video
• Smart, seamless integration with your existing systems. At Vintra, we know that security teams often manage massive conglomerates of systems and security tools including alarm systems, central monitoring stations, mass-notification systems and more. Vintra’s AI-powered video technologies can seamlessly integrate various camera networks and technologies into a single easy-to-use system – with no “rip and replace” required. With an open-API approach that integrates with various Video Management Systems (VMS), Vintra makes what you already have – from your VMS, access control system and even constrained security team – smarter
• Using business intelligence to create a smarter campus. Vintra Fortify provides security leaders with an easy ability to leverage machine learning on their video analytics metadata, resulting in valuable insights regarding such things as building occupancy and usage, student traffic flows, staff safety and so much more. Vintra BI is a complete solution, delivered as a single module that works seamlessly with Vintra Fortify, that allows data captured by enterprise cameras and a university’s VMS to be made valuable by Vintra and then that value extended beyond security to other parts of the organization – such as HR, Operations or Real Estate – via an open API. Accordingly, the insights provided by Vintra BI can prove extremely valuable from a safety and security standpoint, as these various other teams can have actionable data to help them better understand campus usage during high-traffic events, which may suggest improvements in staffing, signage and event setup

Want to learn more about how Vintra can better protect higher education? Please visit Vintra or talk with one of our team members at (408) 610-8959.