Be Careful, Big Boss is Watching!

While surveillance in the form of CCTVs is omnipresent, another trend that's fast catching up is IP-based surveillance. The reasons vary from easy availability of broadband Internet connectivity and the need to monitor offices anytime, anywhere. We look at what all you need to deploy an IP surveillance solution and some of the latest solutions available

Saturday, August 02, 2008

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With increasing Internet bandwidth and the need to access information anytime, anywhere, there's a thrust towards moving everything over IP. So, whether it's voice, video, IM or even surveillance; everything has moved over IP. At all leading public places and events, IP-based surveillance is fast becoming the de-facto standard for monitoring security. So, whether it is the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, traffic lights in New Delhi or the newly constructed malls , IP Surveillance implementations are on a roll across the world. Enterprises too are deploying IP surveillance to safeguard their data centers, ware houses and even offices. And like we've mentioned before, IP cameras can be accessed from anywhere across the globe, all you need is a web browser and access to broadband Internet connectivity. In this story we take a look at the various IP surveillance solutions available in the market, and what all you need to know
before implementing IP surveillance.

Choose the best one for your need
One of the oldest forms of Surveillance which is still popular is CCTV. Many vendors provide IP based CCTV Surveillance. However, you can look beyond the CCTVs towards other intuitive solutions. You can deploy a Standalone CCTV Box that connects to a TV or monitor and supports around 16 channels in one box. Another one is DVR card-based surveillance; here you need a decent system with a PCI slot for inserting the DVR card. You can directly connect your cameras to this DVR card. Here again the average support is for 16 channels. The problem with CCTV based IP surveillance is that you need to have dedicated cabling for it. With IP Surveillance you do not need any special cabling, all you need is an open network port to deploy an IP camera. Another advantage with IP cameras is that they can draw power from Ethernet ports. So, if you deploy a camera at a place where there is no power around or where there's a possibility that someone can disconnect power, PoE comes handy. IP cameras come in different flavors: PTZ (pan,tilt and zoom), fixed, low light cameras, etc. IP cameras support progressive scan, that allows you to remove still images from a video and save them separately.

Most of the surveillance systems support integration with third party systems such as alarms systems, access control, and for large area applications like traffic management or building management.

How to choose a surveillance camera
You should look for a camera which provides 25 fps or faster frame rate, as this results in jitter free images. Monitoring through a Web interface is another must, as it allows you to monitor your infrastructure anywhere, anytime. Many IP cameras allow you to monitor through wireless devices. You can also access surveillance video through your mobile. Make sure that the camera supports standard wireless encryptions such as WEP 128-bit or 256-bit, WPA-PSK, etc. Another important thing to look for is motion detection, as this not only alerts you as soon as a new event is detected but can also help in recording important events.

If you need to prove a happening, with date and time, look for the time stamp feature. You can also look for cameras which provide embedded watermarks on the footage, to reinforce authenticity. To protect yourself from attacks like sniffing or IP replay, look for cameras which support encryption. To counter these threats many people change the default port on which surveillance video is being streamed. Other things you need to look for are motorized control, remote control, email based alerts etc.

Choosing storage for IP surveillance
Storage of the video footage is a key part of any surveillance system. There are however problems in storing images generated from IP cameras, as even a single camera can generate more than 10 GB of data in a single day. Vendors offer dedicated storage for video surveillance. For instance, Seagate offers Series SV35.3 hard drives which are only meant for Video Surveillance. They have increased data rates upto 480 Mb/s with SATA interface. According to Seagate these drives can operate under drive case temperature of upto 75 degrees C. Also, as surveillance system performs constant write operations on a disk, using storage devices such as NAS can degrade the performance of a solution, because these devices are designed for environments where balanced read/ write operations take place.

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