Israeli invention wins Wall Street Journal Award

The 2010 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the area of physical security will be awarded this week in the US to the Israel-based BriefCam Company for its invention, which was developed by Prof. Shmuel Peleg of the Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem The invention offers an innovative solution to quick review of information from security cameras.

Surveillance cameras generate a prodigious amount of video; unfortunately there's not enough time and manpower to watch it all. Other video-surveillance technologies address this problem by fast forwarding through recordings or capturing only moving images using motion detectors, for instance.

BriefCam takes a different approach. Its patented technology, called Video Synopsis, provides a solution to this problem through computer software that creates a synopsis of recorded information, generating a very short video preserving the essential activities of the original video captured over a very long time period. For example, the passage of vehicles passing through a security gate over many hours can ne condensed into a few minutes, showing each vehicle's entry followed immediately by another.

"Five hours of video is not five hours any more," says Peleg, developer of the technology and the company's chief scientist. "It's five minutes." Earlier this year Peleg was the winner of a Kaye Innovation Award at the Hebrew University for his invention.

The Video Synopsis invention was licensed to BriefCam through Yissum, the technology transfer company of the Hebrew University.

The winners of The Wall Street Journal's 2010 Technology Innovation Awards will be honored on Nov. 3 at a ceremony and dinner in Redwood City, Calif.