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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?"
As an added bonus, you can spy on your female coworkers. At least that's what the popups say.
a security guard!
note to self: break in between 10pm and 8am.
One problem that you have to watch out for with digital security systems is random glitches. Sure, it doesn't happen too often, but when it does it can be a real hassle.
At the company I work for, our security system one day decided to change all the codes, so nobody could get in or out of the building. It turns out that something triggered a complet reset, erasing everything and restoring the default settings.
It's funny now, we all laugh about it, but craving a smoke while locked inside can be very stressful. I don't know how many times I was tempted to break a window and escape....
-Space for rent
Why not use that 1TB Array for only $5k? This would be quite ideal for storing mass data such as that. Also, you could have almost any quality you would like, with great performance.
we wanted to catch a change-stealing thief. We bought a buch of alaris weecams off of eBay ($25 and under) and set them up. We didn't bother with motion sensors. The images didn't take up a lot of drive space and the software (webcam32) we used created AVI files for the time lapse. It worked well too - the bonehead looked at one of the cameras up close after he cleaned out a drawer. We had taped over the little light showing it was on and had the monitors off on the PCs. Nice picture. You could probably do it more advanced on the fly (add cameras and drive space as needed) for under capital expense (our company requires God to sign if anything is over $500).
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
I've been thinking of setting up a similar system at my house. It seems simple to throw together a computer controlled video switch, a video digitizer (Bt848?) card, and some cheap CCD cameras.
:)
The motion detection software is commonly available and could be used to drop the frame rate to almost nothing in areas without a lot of traffic.
I'd also like to set up a periodic uploading of the pictures to an off site server in case someone were to steal the computer taking the pictures...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
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.
I had my camera and cable modem up for a day when I caught this image
the story is here
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
What, you didn't click on the 100 X10 popups you got each day?
sulli
RTFJ.
I'm not sure how hard it would be to put something like that together yourself, but I can offer one suggestion in case you decide to try.
National Control Devices has been offering a video switcher for a few years now that will handle up to video 16 inputs, for only $150. It looks really impressive. I've been considering getting one for ages, just to play around with. It's controllable through an RS232 serial port.
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.
This was asked a while ago ..
I'm sure the consensus that I felt was expressed will be the same: go analog.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If you build it yourself you have to prove that you didn't tamper with the evidence (should you ever charge someone with a crime based on the recordings...or fire them and then they contest it).
If someone else builds it a large part of their business plan is how they defend the thing in court. Plus that is something they would pay for.
That's not to say a system you make yourself is significantly more prone to tampering, but it is likely to be perceived as such (esp. if you build one for your home).
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
I'm actually thinking of wiring my house for security too. This is what I'm looking at:
- A bunch of motion sensors, installed at all entry points (actually, pointing to the entry point), including windows and fireplace.
- A few micro camera, pointing to those entry points (I can save a few cameras, if I figure out how to control the head of the camera from the computer)
- An old computer (P166) with a large HD.
- A few cron tasks to activate the system, when we are not at home, or activate only certain areas while we are sleeping.
- Motion sensor signals are sent to the computer for processing.
- Cameras are controlled by computer remotely.
- In order to save disk space, the cameras are activated and start taking video, only when a motion signal is received by the computer. Cameras are turned off 3 hours after last motion signal.
I'm also considering to have 802.11b on my palm, so I can remotely de/activate the system.
I haven't done the total cost estimate yet. But a motion sensor cost around $29, an 80GB HD around $250. Camera's price varies, depends on whether you want b/w or color. I think the wiring part is going to be the most expensive, as I'm no electician.
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.
Nothing against open source, but the integrity of the video has to be proven in court or the guy who stole those laptops walks.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
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.
I don't really know how you would get the correct images back if you need them. Hmmm, maybe a promotion for somebody to win something if they have images with a certain timestamp. Perhaps a date with the cute secretary. Or money, if you have to stoop that low.
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."
If you have PC, a webcam and a burner, you're set.. It doesn't even need to be a fast PC or a fast burner. A typical sysadmin could sit down in one afternoon and get Linux up and running on the box, and toss a few entries into the crontab for that box to build an ISO of all the collected images to a harddisk, and subsequently burn a tarball of the day's events onto a CD-R. Cheap, costs pennies on the dollar compared to most commercial security systems, and is vastly more reliable/configurable/upgradable/stable. All you'de have to do is pop a new CD-R in the tray at the start of business every morning, or hell, make the CD-R a CDRW, and swap the disc out every couple weeks.
DIY or DIE, buddy.
Bowie J. Poag
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
While I'm not a fan of their advertising practices, I am a fan of the hardware. And there is a Linux driver for the CM11A controller. X10 will allow you to integrate motion sensor events with camera control for /very/ short money - 3 cameras, receiver, x10 receiver, etc. for about $140.
My boss recently asked me about implementing a video security system, and this is the way we're going.
Having been involved in the development of just such a system (I won't name names, but you've probably got plenty of their products in your home and work environment already) I can give you one extremely important piece of advice:
;)
Forget all these "get yourself a bunch of webcams and X amount of diskspace".
No uncertified homebrew system will EVER produce footage that's admissable in court. Period.
Contact your local police department for a list of their approved equipment and vendors. The kind of solutions you're looking for do exist out of the box - the one I worked on had all the features you mention plus plenty of others - and you'll be able to use the footage in a "1st Evidence" capacity. Also consult with an attorney experienced in the field.
This is one time when you need to know the legal requirements as well as the technical ones, and as has been said many times before, Slashdot is a really bad place to go for legal advice.
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
I recall either 8 or 16 cameras per rack-mounted machine, but I imagine they've gotten bigger / better / faster in the last five years. A higher number of simultaneous inputs reduces the frame rates, so we chose the maximum number of inputs that could give us the frame rates we desired (3.5 frames/sec, I think.)
They have digital tape jukeboxes parked next to the racks, and even our largest site keeps at least 90 days of video.
They provide client software that allows us to remotely access the video stream via our internal network, and they modified their system to include a SQL database of a journal of the accompanying financial transactions being performed. They identify each computer with a camera, and upon request deliver this journal synchronized with the video stream. We also have some public safety cameras feeding the system that are not tied to the transaction system.
It's elegant for the investigators, who are non-techies. They have search capabilities on that data, and can speed right to the relevant transactions. They can also simply click a button and burn a CD with the selected video stream and it even comes with the required digitally-signed proprietary viewer.
Another thing it has that you maybe haven't yet considered is that their company has experts who will testify in court on our behalf that their system is valid, and that the images haven't been tampered with. We have used their imagery as evidence in many successful prosecutions. IANAL, but having a built-in Trusted Third Party strikes me as a strong benefit.
So, with a wonderful system like this, what are the drawbacks? Money, plain and simple. You have to be willing to invest money (and people) to get a top notch system, but the cost-avoidance was definitely worth it for us.
Oh, and before anyone goes off about Big Brother, you should know that the transactions we are recording are financial in nature, and cash is involved. The computers are ours, and the users know they are being recorded. Just that knowledge provides a huge fraud deterrent. We honestly much prefer deterring theft up front than prosecuting our own employees after the fact. And armed with this system, we have no problem prosecuting thieves.
Disclaimer: I do not have any financial investment in Loronix, I am just a very satisfied customer.
John
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