Unlocking the Power of Video Analytics: Building an Agentic Video Workflow
Summary
This article explores the development of a video analytics AI agent that can perform complex multi-step reasoning over video streams. It introduces the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization, a cloud-native solution that accelerates the development of video analytics AI agents. The blueprint provides a modular architecture with customizable model support and exposes REST APIs for easy integration with other technologies.
The Challenge of Video Analytics
Traditional video analytics tools struggle with limited functionality and a narrow focus on predefined objects. This makes it difficult to build general-purpose systems that understand and extract rich context from video streams. Developers face three core challenges:
- Limited Understanding: Computer vision models struggle with contextual insights beyond predefined objects.
- Retaining Context: Capturing and maintaining systems’ relevant context over time for videos is challenging.
- Integration Complexity: Building a seamless user experience requires integrating multiple AI technologies.
Introducing the NVIDIA AI Blueprint
The NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization offers a solution to these challenges. It enables the development of a video analytics AI agent capable of multi-step reasoning over video streams. The blueprint provides a modular architecture with customizable model support and exposes REST APIs, enabling easy integration with other technologies.
How It Works
The video analytics AI agent workflow involves several key steps:
- Video Input: The system takes in live first-person point-of-view video streams of everyday activities, not limited by any specific contextual scope.
- Question-Answering: The tool accurately answers questions about the user’s past and present environment. For example, “Where did I leave my concert tickets?” and “What was the name of the coworker I just met?”
- Multi-Step Reasoning: The system performs complex multi-step reasoning based on a video stream, providing a hands-free user interface by taking in speech input and providing audio output.
Understanding Video Using the AI Blueprint
The AI Blueprint for video search and summarization provides a cloud-native solution to accelerate the development of video analytics AI agents. It offers a modular architecture with customizable model support and exposes REST APIs, enabling easy integration with other technologies.
Sample Use Case
Imagine a user preparing to leave the house for an important meeting. Before heading out, they remember walking through the kitchen, turning off the stove, and quickly leaving. However, while driving, they start to worry. “Did I really turn off the stove?” To put their mind at ease, they ask the video-understanding agent, “Did I turn off the stove before leaving?”
Getting Started
To build powerful video analytics AI agents, you can use the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization, combined with NVIDIA NIM. The blueprint provides a recipe for combining VLMs, LLMs, and datastores to enable scalable and GPU-accelerated video understanding agents.
Key Components
The blueprint consists of several key components:
- VLMs: Vision language models that process live or archived images or videos to extract actionable insights using natural language.
- LLMs: Large language models that are used for interactive Q&A over videos and custom alerts on live streams to find specific events.
- CA-RAG Module: A Context-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation module that leverages dense captions stored in vector and graph databases as its primary sources for video understanding.
Technical Details
The blueprint supports the following hardware and uses several NIM microservices:
| NIM Microservices | Description |
|---|---|
| cosmos-nemotron-34b | VLM for video understanding |
| meta / llama-3.1-70b-instruct | LLM for Q&A and alerts |
| llama-3_2-nv-embedqa-1b-v2 | LLM for embedding and QA |
| llama-3_2-nv-rerankqa-1b-v2 | LLM for reranking and QA |
Conclusion
Building an agentic video workflow with video search and summarization is a complex task that requires overcoming several challenges. The NVIDIA AI Blueprint provides a comprehensive solution that enables the development of powerful video analytics AI agents. With its modular architecture and customizable model support, developers can create scalable and GPU-accelerated video understanding agents that can perform complex multi-step reasoning over video streams. Whether it’s answering questions about past and present environments or providing detailed summaries of video content, the NVIDIA AI Blueprint is a powerful tool for unlocking the potential of video analytics.