There is little doubt that the use of metadata will continue to grow and evolve in the years to come, particularly in the areas of video metadata and analytics. This evolution is expected to provide more context and meaning to video content, enabling additional insights into human behavior and preferences for a multitude of purposes, including security, improving customer experience, and predicting market trends. With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increasing amount of data generated by connected devices, metadata could play an important role in managing and making sense of this data.

We sought the perspectives of four top IP video companies, all of whom are members of ONVIF, to share their thoughts on the future of metadata.

Todd Dunning, Director, Product Management, Video Security & Analytics, Pelco
Metadata will continue to expand into operational areas of camera technology.  Temperature ranges (thermography) in thermal technology, crowd behavior reports, camera health metrics, and helmet and safety vest metrics are a few items that customers are asking for and are seeking simple ways to report on through metadata.

Barry Norton, VP of Research, Milestone Systems
Over the next 3-7 years, the data on which security solutions are built will become both richer and more domain specific. This will be driven by an increased focus on verticalization, the growing sophistication of cameras and analytics producing metadata, and by the cross-fertilization with other devices and data sources.

Rudolf Spielberger, Solution Business Partner Program,  Bosch Security and Safety Systems
More powerful hardware and significant metadata growth will drive increased adoption of deep learning-based video analytics. Deep learning offers more in-depth scene understanding and enables informed decision-making for quick and automated responses. For example, our Bosch traffic monitoring solution, founded on deep learning, produces comprehensive and reliable metadata. It achieves accuracy levels beyond 95 percent for real-time event detection and data aggregation. The technology will only improve, allowing us to create more value for our customers. 

Gunnar Erlandsson, Global Product Manager, analytics, Axis Communications
We expect metadata to become more important and widely deployed. With the advances in AI technology, it will become possible to generate even richer metadata, including more information about what’s in the scene.