STAC for Transit Cameras?

[Daniel Dufour]

Hi, all.  I work for the transit agency in Chattanooga and I'm wondering if STAC might help us organize and make more accessible (internally) our archives of video feeds from our buses and facilities.  Are there any relevant case studies we should review or people you recommend we speak with?

I saw Darren gave a super interesting talk on the video extension a while back (link).  Would love to hear any thoughts people have on the extension and applicability to our use case!

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Daniel J. Dufour

[Darren Wiens]

Hi Daniel,

I'm not actively developing the STAC video extension (although I'm open to new discussions/PRs) and it almost certainly won't meet your needs without some work, in a few areas.

The main point of the extension was to track embedded metadata (temporal geometry) within videos, although the current implementation (sidecar files) isn't great. Around the same time I made the video extension, OGC came out with the moving features spec, which would consolidate some of the video extension sidecar files, and may be of interest to you, despite your cameras not moving (or maybe they do!). I believe there would also need to be work done on the STAC API side, particularly to enable frame-level search. Furthermore, I'm not sure if frame-level metadata is feasible from a performance perspective - there can easily be thousands of geometries in a single video.

Also, I can't claim to be a video expert (this was a hobby project for me), so there are likely numerous ways the extension could be improved to support more formats and use cases.

Darren