Qognify adds investigation capabilities to Cayuga VMS

The ability to act quickly during a live security/safety incident is vital to a successful outcome. Security operators need tools at their fingertips that are instinctive and intuitive to ensure they respond appropriately, regardless of their knowledge and experience.

Tracking persons of interest across a camera network, in real-time, requires a deep understanding of where cameras are located and the ability to rapidly switch between them. This is where Click2Track comes in – a new advanced investigation capability added to Cayuga R17. It enables operators to easily follow persons of interest, either in a real-time monitoring situation or as part of a post-incident investigation, across every camera connected to the VMS.

In practice, the operator simply activates Click2Track and clicks on the appropriate highlighted area (depending on the direction of travel) displayed on the screen. They are then automatically presented with the next camera feed the moment the subject is in its field of view, ensuring that the subject is always kept under close observation.

Carsten Eckstein, head of product management for Cayuga at Qognify, informed Security Matters: “Click2Track enables any operator to focus their full attention on managing a situation and obtain the best possible outcome, rather than having to know where and how to locate the next best available camera and juggling between feeds and screens.”

Camera sharing

Another feature added to R17 enables operators to work together on an easier footing. With the new camera sharing feature, a camera feed can be instantly shared with that for another operator in just three clicks.

Eckstein added: “It can often be the case that live footage needs to be shared with another operator, or stakeholder, to take a decision on a course of action. In such time-critical circumstances, there’s no need to involve an administrator to amend user rights, but temporary sharing can happen instantly whenever it’s vital that the transition is made instantly.”

The need to mask footage prior to exporting (ie due to General Data Protection Regulation requirements) is another time-consuming process that’s improved significantly with Cayuga R17. Click2Mask automatically detects people in the camera view and creates a mask together with a movement trajectory that preserves a person’s anonymity in accordance with the current data protection and privacy laws.

Click2Mask enables multiple areas to be masked at the same time. It can also be applied to obscure parts of the video that could potentially leak commercially sensitive information or otherwise compromise security.

According to Eckstein: “Using Click2Mask can be as much as ten times faster than the slow manual masking process that will be familiar to so many operators working in Control Rooms right now.”

Additional features

Other new features of Cayuga R17 include one-click alarm categorisation, enhanced support of multi-sensor devices and integration with the new Bosch INTEOX camera platform. 

R17 also makes it easier to upgrade camera firmware through the use of Qognify’s web-based management and monitoring platform, namely Umbrella. 

*More information is available online at www.qognify.com