Four-Dimensional Security Surveillance Equals 3-D Plus Time

Prologue: The nature of site physical security operations will change more in this decade than in all of its previous history. The exponential advancement of technology has created a watershed moment for the physical security industry; a dividing line with clear before and after distinctions.

Before now, most physical security deployments fell short, either because the technology wasn’t ready or because the cost of doing things right was out of reach. I’ve seen people and process workarounds try to cover those gaps for years. But my recent 18 months of experience with advanced AI for physical security has shown that we’ve entered a new era—one where technology finally enables us to meet, and in many cases exceed, our most ambitious operational goals for site physical security.

The only fundamental limitation now isn’t in the technology: it’s in how we think.

Two Key Understandings

There are two things we must understand if we want to take full advantage of this moment:

1. AI’s transformative potential for advancing site physical security operations capabilities.
2. The mindset shift required—by both security professionals and their stakeholders—to adopt AI in ways that turn that potential into real-time, situationally aware site security operations. That shift starts with understanding what’s possible—and knowing that the tools are finally here to make it real.

Automated Four-Dimensional Intelligent Security Surveillance

Before we delve into those two key understandings, let’s examine the broad transformational AI impact that serves as this article’s context: Four-Dimensional Security Surveillance.

I use this term, rather than Four-Dimensional Security Video Surveillance, because it encompasses more than camera feeds. It integrates the human-in-the-loop role with AI-enabled sensing, analysis, automated technical actions, and human decision support. It represents a proactive, responsive form of security surveillance that is active, not passive, one that fuses prevention, intervention and response into a unified operational capability.

From 2D to 3D

For decades, security surveillance was two-dimensional, flat images labeled with a camera ID and timestamp, usually kept for later review. Live monitoring meant operators scanning banks of displays, hoping to spot something in time to act.

Motion detection was the first big step forward, comparing successive still images to find pixel changes. Later, AI added object recognition, so the system could alert when a person, bicycle, vehicle, or unexpected object appeared.

Yet, determining whether activity in the scene was a security incident in progress, a time-based evaluation remained almost entirely a human responsibility layered onto motion-triggered displays. Unfortunately, in large, high-camera-count video system deployments, this approach mainly produced false alarms (often 90% or more) and still missed real incidents.

More recently, AI has made it possible to create 3D extrapolations from high-resolution 2D images, using a camera’s field-of-view dimensions and pixel density. At ISC West 2025, Bosch Security introduced a generative AI-enabled camera that not only adds distance data to what it sees but can also provide a narrative description of each object in its field of view.

From 3D to 4D

With 3D, AI measures distance, locates objects, and understands spatial relationships. But 4D surveillance adds the critical time dimension, interpreting past events, current actions, and future trajectories—aligned with your site’s security plans. For example, it can trace an intruder’s vehicle back to its entry point or predict its next move, enabling faster, smarter responses.

The leap from 3D to Four-Dimensional Security Surveillance (3D plus Time) comes from fully integrating the time dimension into automated analysis, decision support, and action. The importance of the 3D plus Time element can’t be overstated. That’s because every meaningful response decision in security is tied to timing—how soon you know, how quickly you act. As one former Marine, SWAT officer, homicide detective, and sheriff’s anti-smuggling unit operative said recently, “In business, time is money. In security, time is life.”

Breakthrough Capabilities Without Starting Over

It is excellent news for large enterprises and critical infrastructure organizations, which have significant investments in extensive security system deployments, that their systems don’t need to be ripped out and replaced to gain these new capabilities.

Just as importantly, these same capabilities are now available to small and medium-sized businesses—organizations that previously couldn’t access high-caliber security technology due to cost and complexity. “As-a-service” offerings now combine advanced technology with remote security surveillance operations, all bundled into a subscription model. This eliminates the typical capital expenditure barrier that has long challenged smaller businesses looking to implement or upgrade their security systems. As-a-service offerings also evolve in place and thus improve over time rather than grow obsolete.

Fundamental 4D Capabilities

AI empowers physical security systems with new capabilities, enabling real-time, situationally-aware operations that track and respond to events across time—functionality older systems alone couldn’t achieve. Here are some example capabilities:

• Absorbing your operational context; maps, floor plans, SOPs, post orders, guard assignments and building a living, 3D conceptual model of the site.
• Adapting intelligently in real time, with human oversight, applying policies and procedures as appropriate to the unfolding situation, instead of being locked into rigid pre-set rules.
• Helping one individual officer manage multiple simultaneous incidents without losing precision or responsiveness.
• Extending your team’s reach, so they can take more preventive and interventional actions and bring them in earlier, helping to reduce risk, cost and stress.
• Coordinating across systems so digital processes and physical actions happen in sync, at the speed of the incident. Finally, we can have meaningful security system integration.
• Understanding entire scenes using advanced AI models such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, Large Language Models (LMMs), and Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMS) that time-correlate data across text, audio and video inputs—maintaining context over time, distinguishing threat actors from bystanders, narrating ongoing incidents in real time, and even predicting subsequent likely actions.

Taken together, these capabilities transform a network of cameras from a collection of passive lenses into a distributed sensing-and-reasoning partner—one that works with you to prevent incidents, intervene early, and respond with precision.

But none of that happens automatically. It requires a deliberate shift in mindset: designing your AI-enabled site security operations around the outcomes you want to achieve, not just the equipment you can purchase.

New Thinking Insights

We can’t list every possible security incident response, but we can map out the stages in which incidents unfold. These stages can guide the creation of new procedures and the updating of existing ones to create AI-actionable procedures in decision-tree format, enabling fast, intelligent responses even in complex scenarios. It’s common to discover that decision trees share logic across incidents.

Is the offender an employee, a visitor, a daytime intruder, or a nighttime trespasser? Where is the vehicle the nighttime offender arrived in, and does it have occupants? Should the vehicle be monitored in case it moves before the offender returns, indicating at least one accomplice is involved? In an access violation, did the offender secretly slip through a door or was it held open? Using existing data and tracking activity across multiple cameras, AI can answer all such questions, follow decision paths, take automated actions where appropriate, and keep officers fully informed.

Make Strategically Important Changes

This doesn’t have to be a massive, all-at-once security response redesign. It is best done in stages—first addressing the most common and highest-risk incident types, then expanding in priority order. Here’s one reason why. Experience shows that just the first few improvements, such as implementing or strengthening several insider-threat countermeasures, can reduce the number of other untreated incident types. As word spreads about the heightened security focus, it often produces a positive shift in the organization’s overall security culture.

Not all incidents are high stakes. For example, in large parking structures, employees have been found to bypass time limits by having colleagues move cars to evade detection. AI-driven 4D surveillance outperforms officer walkthroughs, tracking every movement over time across multiple cameras, logging plates, identifying culprits, and alerting security for tickets. Eliminating walkthroughs frees officers for critical tasks, boosting security force ROI through enabling more efficient handling of routine issues.

A sensible first step in defining requirements for AI-enabled security technologies is to list security-scenario-based use cases and explore their response-in-depth possibilities, including the alternate paths along which an incident can unfold (i.e., for a pedestrian trespasser vs. a vehicle driver). For off-hours building access authorization, would adding video intercoms to specific doors be beneficial, by patching in the 2-way intercom audio to the mobile phone of a lone security on patrol? Should we add loudspeakers at the points where fence-climbing is frequent or likely? Would people-counting in muster zones enhance and speed up evacuation step verifications?

After breaking down an unfolding incident’s stages, aligning them with AI-assisted response decision trees and identifying helpful technology capabilities, you can discover that some technology capabilities support multiple use cases—meaning a high security ROI for such capabilities. It sometimes takes response-in-depth scenario analysis to discover that several less frequently occurring use cases can together justify the cost of a single capability.

A cost-benefit analysis should incorporate existing staff time saved or future staff time avoided as an essential factor. The comparison should include the non-AI implementation of “as close as we can get” alternatives. Such an in-depth analysis often presents a very positive picture, one that makes a solid case for establishing the proactive, real-time operational capabilities that Four-Dimensional Security Surveillance makes possible.

What Comes Next?

The next issue of Security Executive magazine will present more than a half-dozen breakthrough AI-enabled security technologies as proof that Four-Dimensional Security Surveillance capabilities are not futuristic thinking—they are already here.

The transformation underway in physical security is not incremental—it’s foundational. AI has unlocked a new dimension of operational capability, bringing real-time awareness, intelligent automation, and unprecedented scalability to the forefront. Legacy limitations no longer constrain us; instead, we are challenged—and empowered—to think differently about how we design and operate our security systems. The future is arriving faster than anyone expected, and those who prepare thoughtfully will shape a better future for their organization’s facilities and their occupants.

When I think about physical security’s watershed moment and four-dimensional video surveillance, I am reminded of what Jean-Luc Picard said in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “A Matter of Time”: “Our job is not to predict the future, but to enable it.”

So, I encourage you to join the security professionals who are already reexamining their facility threats and vulnerabilities, reassessing potential scenarios, and—armed with knowledge about the latest AI-enabled physical security capabilities—envisioning the high-performance operations their organizations truly deserve. These aren’t dreams anymore. They’re ready to be lived.