Surveillance
What is Surveillance?
Video camera surveillance systems have come a long way. The first video surveillance system was designed by three German engineers and installed in 1942, it was used to monitor the launching of a rocket. The first video surveillance camera system was installed in the United States in the late 1940’s and as of 2014, over 245 million video cameras were in use worldwide. The word surveillance means the act of carefully watching someone or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime. Therefore, video surveillance systems are an electronic means of watching someone or something. Video surveillance systems are a system of one or more video cameras on a network that send the captured video and audio information to a certain place. The images are not available to the public like television. They are live monitored or transmitted to a central location for recording and storage.
The basic equipment necessary for a video camera surveillance system includes cameras to capture the images and some sort of recording device or monitoring service; one and two-way audio speakers are also becoming more popular every day which adds yet another tool to the arsenal of a surveillance system monitoring company’s trained technicians. Cameras, possibly speakers, and a recording device or monitoring capabilities is about all you will need besides the usual miscellaneous supplies used when installing any kind of A/V equipment. When it comes to video surveillance cameras, there are two basic types of cameras but there are several different options you can choose from. The two types of surveillance cameras available are analog and digital. The signal from an analog camera can be recorded to a videotape recorder, it can be converted to a digital signal and stored on a computer, or it can be stored on a digital video recorder.
Digital cameras, on the other hand, are much more user-friendly than analog cameras. Digital video surveillance cameras use a digital signal to transmit the images so the need to convert them is eliminated. This makes it easier to store the information on a computer. A Digital camera has a higher resolution than an analog camera. Digital images are available at up to 11 megapixels which makes it possible to read license plates. Even with the best analog camera, you could never read a license plate.
Benefits of Surveillance
REDUCE LOSS, THEFT, AND VANDALISM
Let’s start with the obvious advantages a digital system provides, compared to analog. Digital surveillance cameras not only capture and store more video than analog systems, but the quality of the video feed is far superior as well.
EXPERIENCE EASIER INSTALLATION AND MORE EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION
Digital systems can be installed more easily than analog systems, require less equipment, and can help your security team more effectively operate the surveillance system. Analog surveillance systems need complex wiring to cameras in order to view multiple video feeds. Today’s advanced digital surveillance systems require much less work to install and maintain.
IMPROVE STORAGE AND ACCESSIBILITY
Most analog surveillance systems use tape recorders to store video footage. This decreases the amount of video that can be stored and ease of accessibility of that footage. Digital video surveillance systems store all the footage your cameras capture on DVR (digital video recorder) systems with ample storage space. This means your security team will also be able to store more surveillance footage with digital than they can with analog.
ENABLE REMOTE MONITORING
This might be the most overlooked advantage of a digital surveillance system. With a highly-integrated digital video system, you can monitor the activity on your surveillance feeds from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a connection to the Internet. Mobile devices, laptops and tablets are all fair game. You can log in to your security system from any of these devices and view live streams or access archived footage.
REDUCE COST & SCALE MORE EASILY
First and foremost, digital video surveillance is more cost-effective than its analog counterpart. A digital system requires less physical infrastructure to operate (think fewer wires) than an analog system. Since digital cameras produce higher quality images with wider viewing angles, you’ll need fewer cameras to cover the same space, too. And, as mentioned above, digital feeds can be compressed and stored using less space than analog video. Digital video cameras use CAT-5 wiring and Power-Over-Ethernet (POE) technology to combine power and video transmission in one cable, which is a big improvement of the coaxial and power cables analog requires.
SAVE TIME WITH DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCY
With a new digital surveillance system keeping a sharp eye on the activities in your business, and countless hours of video captured, who is going to have the time to watch every hour of footage? Analog systems have gaps in security coverage that digital systems fill with distributed intelligence. It is impossible to sit and view every minute of security footage captured by your digital surveillance system, but distributed intelligence can fill that gap. Available software programs can monitor video feeds to pick up events, activities and specified behavior through the recognition of movement patterns. Alerts are generated and sent to your security team. Analog systems cannot match this capability.