AWS recently announced the general availability of Streaming Video Events, a new feature of Amazon Rekognition to provide real-time alerts on live video streams.
The managed service for image and video analysis can help camera manufacturers and service providers detect objects such as people, animals, and packages in live video streams from connected cameras. Streaming Video Events triggers a notification to the device as soon as the expected object is detected. Prathyusha Cheruku, principal product manager at AWS, explains how it works:
The service starts analyzing the video clip only when a motion event is triggered by the camera. When the desired object is detected, it sends a notification that includes the objects detected, bounding box coordinates, zoomed-in image of the objects detected, and the timestamp. The Amazon Rekognition pre-trained APIs provide high accuracy even in varying lighting conditions, camera angles, and resolutions.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/connected-home
Amazon Rekognition Video relies on Kinesis Video Streams to receive and process the video stream: the AWS::Rekognition::StreamProcessor type creates a stream processor used to detect and recognize faces or to find connected home labels.
To better manage the machine learning inferencing costs, customers can specify the length of the video clips to be processed (between 10 and 120 seconds) and can choose one or more objects such as people, pets, and packages, minimizing false alerts from camera motion events. Cheruku clarifies the benefit of Streaming Video Events over traditional motion detectors:
Many camera manufacturers and security service providers offer home security solutions that include camera doorbells, indoor cameras, outdoor cameras, and value-added notification services to help their users understand what is happening on their property. Cameras with built-in motion detectors are placed at entry or exit points of the home to notify users of any activity in real time, such as "Motion detected in the backyard". However, motion detectors are noisy, can be set off by innocuous events like wind and rain, creating notification fatigue, and resulting in clunky home automation setup.
According to AWS, service providers can use the feature to create better in-app experiences, for example Alexa announcements such as "a package was detected at the front door". In a separate article, Mike Ames, Prathyusha Cheruku, and David Robo explain how 3xLOGIC uses the new feature to provide intelligent video analytics on live video streams to monitoring agents.
Streaming Video Events is not the only new feature of Amazon Rekognition. Among the 2022 announcements, Rekognition Video added new languages for text detection, introduced new Face APIs for improved accuracy and improved content moderation.
Video Streaming Events is a feature available in a subset of AWS regions, including Northern Virginia, Ohio, Ireland and Mumbai. The label detection is charged at $0.00817/min, with minute increments. The processing of Kinesis Video Streams is charged separately.
