Video analytics
Software that extracts meaning from camera footage — detecting people, vehicles, states, and events — rather than just recording it. Ranges from simple motion triggers to deterministic policy enforcement.
Glossary
The camera-AI vocabulary, in plain language
Every term you will meet while evaluating video AI — defined the way we would explain them in a meeting, with links to where each one matters.
Core technology
Computer vision
The field of AI that lets software understand images and video: locating objects, classifying them, and tracking them across frames. The detection layer under every camera-AI use case.
Edge inference
Running AI models on hardware physically at the site — next to the cameras — instead of in a remote cloud. Gives millisecond decisions, works through connectivity loss, and keeps raw video on-premises.
CamEdge →Zero-training detection
Detection that works out of the box, without collecting site-specific footage, annotating it, and training custom models. Deployment shrinks from months of data projects to days of configuration.
Deterministic rules engine
A rules layer where the same condition always produces the same decision — as opposed to probabilistic, black-box scoring. Rules are written in plain English and every alert traces back to the exact rule that fired.
Try the Rule Playground →VLM (vision-language model)
An AI model that connects images to language — able to describe what a camera sees in plain words. Used for event explanations and natural-language search across footage.
AI Copilot →Cameras & infrastructure
ONVIF
The open industry standard that lets IP cameras and video systems from different vendors interoperate. If your cameras speak ONVIF, an analytics layer can connect to them without replacement.
Check your cameras →RTSP
Real-Time Streaming Protocol — the standard way IP cameras deliver live video streams over a network. The other common integration path for existing camera estates.
VMS (video management system)
The software that records, stores, and plays back camera footage. A system of capture, not of action — analytics layers like Camnitive run alongside it.
Camnitive vs VMS analytics →VSaaS (video surveillance as a service)
Cloud-hosted surveillance: footage streams to a vendor cloud, often on vendor-managed cameras. Convenient for light use; a poor fit where bandwidth, residency, or existing estates matter.
Camnitive vs cloud VSaaS →Retrofit (camera AI)
Adding AI to the cameras a site already owns via an on-site inference layer, instead of replacing the estate with new AI cameras. Days to deploy versus quarters, at a fraction of the capital cost.
Retrofit vs rip-and-replace →Air-gapped deployment
A deployment with no external network connectivity at all — the full platform operates inside the site boundary. The strictest of the four Camnitive deployment models.
Security & trust →Compliance & evidence
Sealed evidence
Event footage that is timestamped and cryptographically sealed at capture, so it can be proven unaltered later — evidence you can rely on in front of auditors, insurers, and regulators, not just footage you happen to have.
Chain of custody
The documented trail of who accessed a piece of evidence, when, and what they did with it — from capture to export. Required for evidence to hold up in disputes and investigations.
Data residency
Legal requirements that certain data — including workplace video — stays within a country’s borders. Laws like the Saudi and UAE PDPL, Indonesia PDP, and Singapore PDPA make residency an architectural question.
Regulation Navigator →Sovereign AI
AI deployed so that data, processing, and control remain under the owner’s (and their country’s) jurisdiction — on-premises or in-country, rather than in a foreign vendor cloud.
EU AI Act (for deployers)
The EU’s AI regulation, whose high-risk obligations became enforceable for deployers in August 2026. Workplace camera AI can qualify as high-risk — bringing logging, oversight, and documentation duties.
EU AI Act readiness →DPIA
Data Protection Impact Assessment — the structured privacy analysis GDPR (and similar laws) require before high-risk processing like workplace video analytics. Deployments should ship with DPIA-ready documentation.
RBAC
Role-based access control: permissions granted by role rather than individually, so who can view, export, or configure is governed and auditable. Paired with per-access audit logging in Camnitive.
Retention by policy
Video and event data deleted or kept according to configured rules rather than manual habit — a control privacy regulators and DPIAs look for explicitly.
Operations & safety
Near-miss
A safety event that could have caused harm but did not — a person inside a vehicle’s path who stepped away in time. Leading indicators of the incidents to come; camera AI makes them measurable for the first time.
Exclusion zone
An area people must not enter — around machines, cranes, blasting, or energized equipment — enforced by rules on the cameras that watch it, permanently or on a schedule.
Restricted zone monitoring →PPE compliance
Whether required personal protective equipment — helmets, vests, gloves, eyewear — is actually being worn. Continuous camera-based verification replaces sampled spot checks.
PPE detection →Man-down detection
Detecting that a person has fallen and remained down, and escalating within seconds — critical for lone workers and low-traffic areas where discovery otherwise depends on chance.
Fall & man-down detection →Dwell time
How long a person or vehicle stays in one place — a trailer at a dock door, a queue at a gate. Measured continuously from camera views, it drives detention disputes and throughput decisions.
Loading dock analytics →OEE
Overall Equipment Effectiveness — the standard manufacturing productivity metric (availability × performance × quality). Camera-based stoppage detection surfaces the micro-stops that vanish inside OEE averages.
Deployed in days. Resident in-country. Auditable end-to-end.
On the cameras you already own. Start with a 10–50 camera pilot, see measurable ROI in weeks, and grow it into your operations system of record.
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