Slashdot Mirror
Recommendations for Digital Security Systems?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "My company has an ailing analog security
system, (you know the types: 16 position multi-plexer etc, 24hour VHS
tape, and so on). We're in the market for a 21st century solution,
and was hunting around for a computer/hard drive solution, being able
to store up to 8 weeks of video, from 8am to 10pm, 7 days a week at
multiple frame rates (up to 30, but we'll settle for 3 to 5 frames
per second, with motion detection...) and preferably at a resolution
where you can tell if that's a nose on the persons face or not!"
It's a reasonable enough question. Just for fun, how difficult would
it be to build such a system using consumer-level-off-the-shelf
parts?
"Some of the ones we're looking at have in the order of 480gb of storage. Windows or Linux based, it does not matter, but the ability to schedule recordings, export the pictures (water-marking for possible criminal and court proceedings...), backup options to dat/cd-r/dvd-r, always on, ability to view previous footage AND record live from multiple camera's (8/16 or better), possible remote network access, motion recording, and ability to use both digital or analog cameras (significant previous investment in these, would like to re-use the colour newer models...) and newer digital higher resolution camera's are some of the features I would like. Any ideas from the very knowledgeable Slashdot crew?"
I"m sure these guys could help. Still in Dev so you could prolly get it fairly cheap and insure that they incorporated the exact features you want.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Their network cams use multipart jpegs over HTTP. You can simply save off the growing jpeg file on a disk, or you can also set the camera to automatically upload a incrementally-numbered file onto an FTP server every n seconds, or you can write a small script that'll pull the file from HTTP every n seconds ...
What's more, you can also use third-party free software such as VNCCam that will allow you to customize and view your camera's display over VNC.
That's what I use for an indoors security solution : I have one of these cameras bolted on a ceiling (it comes with the hardware) of a room that has expensive equipment. For indoor use, these little cameras work great, they're reliable, they only cost between $500 and $1000, and they're a no-brainer to get going. However, if you plan on outdoors security, an Axis camera is definitely not what you want.
My EUR 0.03.
jwz is trying to do 24/7 streaming video(plus audio it seems) at his nightclub...
check it out: DNA Lounge tools
also of interest: DNA Lounge: Video Webcast
It also interfaces with point of sale systems, captures images at predefined events (such as NO SALE's or lottery winnings etc). It does timelapse video with retention as far back as 13 months. It does sales reporting as well as many other reports.
I could go into more detail but I'll just direct you to the website.
http://www.visilinx.com
Check it out...
RCA capable capture cards (winTV and others with the BT848) are about $25 now. All you need then
is practically any security camera. If you don't
mind investing in a card for each camera, multiplexing becomes trivial. Since they're PCI,
4-5 per computer is as good as you're going to get, but you can use low end pentium systems for the capturing easily enough.
Then you can do several frame captures per second easily enough if you want to store frames, or you can do realtime mpeg encoding. At 5 fps, with full color/sound, you're talking a little under 100 megs an hour per source when recording at 320x240. And this is without scaling down the quality any.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Check out Patapsco Designs, they make a product called datacatch. I've been to their site and seen the product, it rocks! You can tie it into a cash register system too to track transactions as they happen.
m l
(Plus they are using embedded Linux for thier newer camera-network interface)
http://www.patapsco.com/pdi/featured_product.ht
or
http://www.digitaldatacatch.com
~Sean
From the start, is it feasible to store to HDD?
8am to 10pm is 14 hours/day. That's 14 * 3600 = 50400 seconds/day.
8 weeks * 7 days = 56 days storage required.
56 days * 50400 secs = 2,822,400 seconds storage
at 30 frames/sec, or 30 * 2822400 = 84,672,000 frames total storage.
A 100Gb hard disk stores 100*10^9 bytes (NB: not 100*2^30). Divide that by the number of frames:
100*10^9 / 84672000 = 1181 bytes per frame. This seems a little low, although I'm not sure exactly how much you can compress the data. DVD -> DivX compresses about 10x...
A DivX movie uses about 200 megs/hour, so if you want that quality, you'd go through 160 Gb in 56 days. That doesn't sound too bad, because you don't need DivX quality -- if you push the compression up a bit (and the quality down a bit) you should be able to fit 56 days of fairly good data in 80 Gb.
This could be reasonable. If you want 8 or 16 cameras, multiply that by 8 or 16 -- 640-1280 Gb total storage, so 4-8 of the new Maxtor 160Gb drives will keep you going nicely.
I think I'm obliged to link to the $5K terabyte disk array now, but that's not really such a big thing -- if you've got 2 free IDE channels (buy a new controller card if required, they're cheap), you can plug 4 160Gb drives into the PC that's running the thing. Don't worry about RAID if you don't want to, just plug in the drives and set the software to swap drives when one gets full.
You are allowed to be locked into a building until someone pulls a fire alarm. Many of the doors at my old University had magnetic locks that would open if the power failed or the fire alarm went off.
My current employer, Ultrak, does exactly this sort of thing. Our Eurocorder II(PDF doc) unit is a digital video recorder unit, it is PC based and runs a version of the NetBSD OS. It is capable of up to 16 cameras per unit. And has Motion detection, and a pre-event buffer, so you can save valuable drive space by only recording actual events, and still get the whole show; or you can keep a camera going in a "live" recording state. You can also backup to CD-R by default, and have the option of reviewing previous records while the system records. Your requirements pretty much describe our product.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
check out the system from www.everfocus.com :)
it's cool...and sounds just like what you are looking for I think it's about 3K maybe less for 16 cams....it's cool
Panasonic sells a web camera (e.g. just plug the ethernet cable in) that can be had for around $350 which includes pan (~120 degrees) and tilt (~90 degrees). It also allows you to wite in up to four "detectors", such as latches, buttons, motion sensors, etc.
Just search google for "panasonic web camera".
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Check out http://www.integraltech.com their DVX systems are easy to setup and have the best looking interface I have ever seen.
Gyyr has been in the time-lapsed video surveillance business since the 70's. They have a QNX-based DVR/16 channel multiplexer systems for a while now. It's QNX-based --- so rock solid as hell. Banks and casinos use these professional equipments.
http://www.silent-witness.com/
Forget about Tivo's and other consumer dvr's --- most of them are based on linux so they crash more often than QNX/vxworks-based systems. Also you are paying a lot of money on useless things like on-screen tv guide/vcr plus royalties.
Assuming that you manage about a terabyte of storage, here are your numbers...
Let's use Tivo's basic quality as an example, but drop the framerate to 15fps. This should look acceptable considering the limited changes from a stationary camera.
A week's worth of data would use up 49 GB per camera. 16 cameras? 784GB.
I'd advise settling for something more realistic at this point. Perhaps lowering the resolution, or going grayscale. Either way, you've still got to address *sixteen* cameras, so they'll need to be Axis webcams or something else capable of talking IP. There's no way that you'll get away with USB cameras.
So, assuming that black and white reduces you to 33% of the previous number, that's still 262GB per week.
You'd need slightly over two *terabytes* of storage to handle 8 weeks of 15 fps, TV resolution, B&W footage from 16 cameras.
And you'd still need a way to encode the video feed to MPEG on the fly at the camera. And handle roughly 2.3 Mbit/sec per cam into your "server," which would have to reliably write 37 Mbit/sec to your 2 TB array. Without failing.
Now, considering the fact that this is all *WAY* under Fast Ethernet and ATA specs, it's doable. But a homegrown solution with 8 week rollback just isn't feasible. Drop the rollback by a bit, dump to tape (unless you've got a fiber line going to a remote site for backups,) and keep a lot of spare drives around. You can't afford to have a failure anywhere in this assembly.
Sorry if I've taken the wind out of anyone's sails through the judicious use of math, but I just wanted to make sure that no one does anything without being informed.
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
This place sells nag-removed TiVos PVRs just for this purpose. With two 80GB hard drives, you would store 160 hours of decent quality video with audio. Note: I have no experience doing business with the company so I'm not vouching for them. See The Tivo Community Forum for comments on the company.
You would still need to get a time/date generator to put in line with the video feed if you want to make the evidence court-admissible. Those are standard CCTV devices and may be built into CCTV cameras. DVRs are used by CCTV and surveillance professionals
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
There's a company called Dedicated Micros that has a 1U rackmount 320Gb digital security system, runs a stripped down linux, has a groovy little webserver interface, and controls up to 16 cameras on a single unit, and you can cascade multiple units. Also includes external SCSI connector to connect either an external tape device to archive the video, or an external drive enclosure/RAID array... We've got one here, and they even support PTZ cams... It's totally slick!
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
we had to put something together on short
notice with similar specs. motion detection,
small hidden cameras, wireless, stored on
a harddrive, etc. we purchased the entire
system (sans computer) from the spy outlet
for $1000 and it's been running well for
over a month.
A security company local to me (D/A Central) sells and supports software from Lenel that does professional digital security systems, including video. We evaluated this as part of a security system purchase, and it was really expensive. We ended up going with a less sophisticated (and analog) system from Galaxy Control Systems (seriously). The demos of the Lenel stuff were quite impressive, and they were serious enough that I imagine that the data they collected would stand up in court (to comment on a previous poster's concern). BTW, almost all of this stuff is Windows only, but continues to work if the controlling computer is unavailable. However, the security of that computer becomes paramount (ours isn't on the network and is in a locked room, for example). If your company is serious, X10 and some random freshmeat probably isn't the way to go; what security company supports that, anyhow? Find a company in your area that sells Lenel (or whatever) and have them do it right for you.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
The online demo indicates that the resolution is great under good lighting, but lousy in dim light.
A couple of years ago I saw the Digital Detective from DPS which was a hard disk recorder box for video surveillance taking up to 4 cameras. The best features included being able to tweak what is stored on events including going back in time (perhaps only a little but even 10 secs makes a huge difference) and it could hook up to the net for remote viewing etc. Don't know if they still do them or if they cover all your criteria but no-one else had mentioned them.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source