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?"

Comments

note to self:

[Anonymous Coward]

note to self: break in between 10pm and 8am.

dangers

[.sig]

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....

We did it cheap...

[eaddict]

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).

worked for me

[UnderAttack]

I had my camera and cable modem up for a day when I caught this image
the story is here

Here's a cheap solution

[J.D. Hogg]

Get an Axis camera

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.

Visilinx

[alienswede]

The company I work for sells a complete remote management solution for the convenience store industry that does all the things described in the original post.

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...

admissible in court

[reverse flow reactor]

Don't forget to answer the question "Is this system admissible in court"?. VHS tapes may be ancient technology, but chances are, a judge in court will know more about how your tape based system works that that system you made from freshmeat tarballs.

Nothing against open source, but the integrity of the video has to be proven in court or the guy who stole those laptops walks.

cheap solution

[alexjohns]

Get a new domain - hotchicksinoffices.com or something like that - set up your cameras as webcams, get every employee to link to that homepage so that Google ranks it high, get a little word-of-mouth advertising via your geekiest employees, then, to coin (and extend) Linus's infamous line: "Let the perverts on the net mirror your images." It might help if you could get your female employees to dress slutty, sometimes. You could have "Dress Slutty Fridays" or "Hooker Thursdays". If you have any good-looking men, you might try the same thing for them. "Lumberjack Days" and "Construction Worker Week" might do well in certain markets.

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.

Ok, here goes nothing...

[Raptor CK]

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.

The almost ideal digital security system...

[plover]

At all of our high-risk locations, and most of our other locations, we use a digital recording system made by Loronix. It scales well, we have some buildings with dozens of cameras feeding into the system and some with hundreds. They can accept both analog and/or digital camera inputs to each recording unit. Keeping some of our older analog cameras preserved quite a bit of investment; saving not only the cost of new cameras but saving the installation costs (which are actually higher than the camera costs in some locations!)

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.