How Video Annotation can Enhance Company Operations

Moving pictures in a sequence has a mesmerizing effect on people, capturing their attention and influencing them in ways no other medium of information disbursal can. This factor has made them potent tools for businesses to better reach customers and train their employees.

Today, we have another emerging technology that can further enhance this effect of videos in the form of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Business stakeholders can seek expert assistance for video annotation to facilitate improvement in company operations and thus maximize efficiency and productivity.

If you’re wondering what comprises video annotation and how its adoption can positively affect your business, this blog is for you. You’ll find details on how this impacts business operations, along with the added benefits of outsourcing video annotation services to a dedicated agency.

What Is Video Annotation and How Does It Help?

The video annotation process involves collecting large quantities of sample video data from numerous sources for training and testing AI/ML models. Depending on the requirements specified by the end user, for annotating pertinent target subjects/objects, annotation experts use a plethora of sophisticated techniques, like bounding boxes and segmentation. The annotated data sets train AI/ML models deployed for various business operations.

In short, annotation allows the utilization of enterprise data in many departments of your business, replete with the advantages of automation like better cost management and quicker, more accurate outputs.

How Video Annotation Can Benefit Your Business’s Various Components

Security

Every company’s security has two aspects that require attention: physical and digital. Video annotation can benefit both of these aspects tremendously. Today, it’s a standard practice to use CCTV cameras and other video recording devices all over an organization’s premises. The video data feed is noted by a security department that scrutinizes the happenings to determine any potential security threat.

However, the task becomes difficult if there is a lot of traffic in the video to monitor, leading to the possibility of the danger not being averted. The same is true in cases of threat to personal property and individuals, where an organization can help mitigate that person’s and property’s problems through surveillance video.

To simplify tracking threats, especially when there is a rise in traffic, businesses have chosen to include AI-trained elements in the security system to detect potential threats in video footage in real-time. It can have the same accuracy of detecting threats regardless of the duration of operation and traffic volume.

• Technologies like facial recognition can help preempt problems by correctly identifying wanted persons and notifying the concerned authorities.
• This technology can also be used to enhance data security. The system can permit only authorized persons to data-sensitive places like server rooms by identifying that person and automatically allowing access/entry.
• This prevents unauthorized access that can cause data security issues.
• This technology benefits companies by providing security for personal property and individuals using their products like Tesla has done with its Sentry Mode surveillance system that identifies potential car theft scenarios and records footage for proof.

Assembly Line and Factory Management

The factory floor is undergoing a major transformation due to the increased use of automation for production. As more stages of the assembly line and associated segments are turned over to computers, there is an increase in the need to automate their performance, too, to ensure that the results are in line with expected parameters. Video-based feedback systems have AI models trained using video annotation.

• The entire assembly line can be rigged with cameras and sensors to obtain visual and other forms of feedback about the performance of the line’s various components, like robotic arms.
• The visual data can be mixed with data from the other sensors to enable the system to have true situational awareness. If it detects any anomalies, it can make the necessary corrections using the same set of sensors and meet set parameters.
• Quality assessment is an example of this, where the system can easily reject defective components by identifying the problem and its scale quickly.
• This concept can be further extended to line tracers and other robots moving around critical components on the factory floor.
• Annotation helps them correctly identify moving persons they may encounter in their paths and stop to prevent them from getting injured. Such safety measures can also be applied to factory workers using automated systems that can track their behavior and notify actions that could compromise the safety of the factory and the people in it.

Video annotation can also be applied to manage the factory’s infrastructure. Surveillance footage from the site’s various sectors can be used as visual sensor data to detect leaks and defects that could compromise the integrity of the structure and the safety of the people there. Additional aids like thermal and infrared cameras can be attached, and data from that can be annotated to help detect problems that may escape regular visual inspection.

Thus, with video annotation, you help keep your manufacturing effective and safe and churn out products that extend that safety to their users.

Inventory, Logistics, and Supply Chain

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of a product-based business is inventory and supply chain management. This is due to the sheer scale and interlinking segments that should all perform optimally for the successful flow of goods. An obstacle in any link will cause problems throughout the chain. Many of these problems can be mitigated, if not eliminated, if you use accurately annotated video data to train AI models deployed in this area. When businesses struggle to find in-house staff to perform video data labeling, they can engage in video annotation services provided by professionals.

• Many measures used for factory floors can be reapplied to warehouse inventory management. Where the AI for factories looks into different stages of product assembly, the AI for warehouses can monitor the different stages of obtaining, storing, and sending goods.
• Video annotation can help it read the barcodes of various boxes to note the content and other specifics contained in each.
• That can be tallied with visual data obtained from the cameras in the buildings to track and mark every box’s location for easy retrieval.
• It could also make automated updates in the inventory management system regarding those details about goods.
• Increasing automation in warehouses is also introducing robots to handle various tasks in the warehouse, similar to the factory floor.
• Hence, with some modification, video annotation used in the latter case can be adapted for managing these machines in warehouses for operational and safety purposes.

Video annotation is also finding increased use to monitor goods in transit. All the vehicles that are part of the supply chain can be monitored through a central station using software to ensure the safety of the items and people. Real-time monitoring is used for this, and video feeds from satellites and roadside cameras can be used to identify the vehicles, among others, for tracking. Self-driving vehicle technology also uses AI-trained models to safely drive through traffic by correctly identifying various objects around it and gauging their relevant characteristics like speed, distance, and vehicle type.

Hence, video annotation can be a powerful tool to keep your supply chain working as a well-oiled machine, regardless of the number of moving parts.

Marketing and Sales

Video has been a marketing staple since its invention, with its scope broadening with the development of new technologies like the television and the internet. Today, it is quickly becoming the primary means of marketing products due to the variety of content that can be pushed through it, with Statista noting that online videos had a staggering reach of 92% in 2021. Marketers are also increasingly relying on it, with over 76% reporting that video marketing increased their sales.

• Getting videos trending on your choice of social media platforms can be tricky but necessary for brand visibility increases.
• You should review many famous and trending videos from popular content creators on the various platforms of choice, preferably in the same field as yours, to understand what makes them tick.
• This can be daunting due to the sheer scale unless you automate that task.
• An AI model fed with appropriately labeled data sets can go through all the videos and help identify common factors that could be behind their popularity.
• These could include keywords, themes, background music, fonts, color schemes, transitions, etc. You can use this data as guidelines for creating your marketing videos.

With advancements, video annotation can also assist in making better sales figures. Experts can create AI that can monitor facial expressions and other cues of target individuals from videos of them. That analysis can be combined with other data of theirs to create a persona complete with all the sales team needs to understand that person and deliver the most appealing sales pitch. The same method can be applied to multiple target audience members to gauge their reactions to various products on display and determine their interests.

Many more exciting sales and marketing opportunities are opening up with the advancement of video annotation and AI technology.

Medical Treatments

Video annotation also pushes the envelope on what’s possible in the healthcare sector. Remote care is gaining more traction with time due to its ability to connect patients with appropriate healthcare professionals. AI is being incorporated into many of the applications that enable remote care.

• Healthcare apps providing the facility of remote health checkups via live streaming can use a trained AI model to quickly assess the patient’s condition using the live feed from the phone’s camera.
• This helps bring down the workload on the staff and allows them to see more patients during a given period.
• Such diagnostics can also occur with MRI and other scanning techniques where the AI model can help technicians recognize health problems in real time, thereby reducing the chances of false diagnosis while increasing the diagnostic rate.
• It can even predict problems by looking at a video of a potential patient and judging their gait and other physical attributes.

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough facility created with the help of using annotated data in AI models is remote surgery. The surgeon needs to operate on the patient using robotic arms with various sensors, including visual. Video annotation can ease their operation by helping the AI model identify the important parts of the patient and other information like the depth of incision required. It helps make quality care accessible and safe even in rural areas.

AI Video Generation

This concept is still in its infancy but has revolutionary potential in video creation. Here, an AI renders entire video sequences without anyone having to shoot a single frame or create one digitally. All the user has to do is type the requirements of the video, and the AI will generate one with them. Video annotation is extensively used to sample thousands of hours of video content to help develop the AI model.

The use cases for such technology in business operations are many. One example is using the AI model to create training videos using a predefined persona and the study material referenced from a database. You could quickly have a training video without needing a physical instructor and recording equipment.

Conclusion

Video may be an illusion of motion created using a series of images played at a pace fast enough for the eye not to be detected. But the effects it has on businesses every day are very real, enabling a series of events that could play out at a fast rate and take the business forward. Annotated data lets you leverage the power of AI for your business and change every aspect in ways previously inconceivable.

If you need expert assistance to get your video data annotated, you can always consider outsourcing video annotation services to professionals. This way, you get to reduce costs and time, especially if you outsource the process to an agency in a developing country, while simultaneously improving the value of video data in your data warehouse and building your brand.

Author Bio:

Jake Wilson is a content strategist with experience in the eCommerce and data domains, particularly in the B2B sector. He has spent his 10+ years-long career creating content that revolves around the latest and most significant trends and evolutions in the global data and eCommerce sectors. He has created hundreds of articles around enterprise data management, email list building, product data entry, listing development, data enrichment, and search engine optimization, and has also consulted businesses on managing major data systems, CRMs, ERPs, eCommerce marketplaces, and development platforms like eBay, Shopify, Magento, and others.

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