Closed Circuit Television in Operation

Video surveillance used to be done with very high cost closed circuit cameras and very low recording quality.  In order to get high quality, you had to spend a fortune to get the resolution you needed, but still had the quality problem of the media used to store it.  In order to get an ample amount of recording time, you had to sacrifice frame-rate so you weren’t changing tapes every two hours.  Even while the cost of cameras continued to drop drastically in the late 90’s, storage was still an issue.

Discontinuous Change One

Digital video recorders drastically changed the game minimizing the storage time problem while providing massive additional benefits.  At the same time, the consumer demand for video recording continued to drop the cost of the CCD allowing us to get smaller, better quality pictures from smaller, more discreet cameras.  However, much like today most video surveillance customers still did not have a dedicated person watching their camera system, forcing them to wait until an event has happened before they could review the video recording and hope to find the event.  Assuming they were able to find the event, was it recorded with enough quality to provide the information need to take action?  Was the camera in the right position to capture the event?  How good was the lighting?  Can we identify the individual in the recording?  Does it give us enough information to make decisions?

Discontinuous Change Two

Courtesy of Lenel.com

Last month at ASIS, it was exciting to see intelligent video analytics closely maturing to a point of keeping up with the Hollywood/CSI set of customer expectations.   Today with Moore’s Law in full effect, digital image quality and digital storage capacity are continuing to double every few years to the point of providing forensic level documentation without the NASA level cost.  As this technology continues to develop, it will be interesting to see how much further we can take it to help our customers with their security and business operational needs.

Video is certain to be more prevalent with better illuminated, higher definition video stored for several months in the cloud.  While I write this, we are already providing video monitoring with forensic quality documentation, video analytics with meta tags across cost effective HD video cameras making intelligent decisions and alerting our customers to specific events as they unfold.  As the security hardware and software community continues to grow together, we will see less expensive, mainstream video designs evolving from passive to very active solutions at extremely high quality.  The consumer market has created a high definition quality demand in the security industry outpacing traditional security design practices.  Where these innovative and game changing technologies meet, we need to challenge the industry to stay ahead of the curve and deliver.