Wishing you a wonderful holiday season this year.  SEE YOU IN 2012!!!

Analytics as Resource Management

One thing we always stress about the use of analytics in video security is resource management.  In essence, video analytics are the ultimate resource management tool.   Used correctly, video analytics are “purpose based” meaning that they allow the camera to become a proactive sensor that selectively chooses when video is sent over a network and how it is stored.

Five years ago the big buzz was “anti-terrorism” with analytics.  Everything was about catching the backpack left behind on the train platform.  That was the major reason why (the conventional wisdom went) analytics would take over the video security space.  This reached a fever pitch around 2008 when you could not throw a rock at ISC West without hitting somebody peddling “Intelligent Video” in some fashion or other.    We now have come to realize that a secondary (and arguably equal) benefit to video analytics is in its ability to fight the ever-growing amount of data that needs to be processed, stored, and transmitted by video management systems.

There are two major contributing factors to the increase in data: growing camera counts and development of megapixel cameras.  On one hand we are reaching new levels of ubiquity in the United States market when it comes to security cameras.  People are just more comfortable and accepting to the benefits of security cameras than they ever have been before.  This is driving up the number of cameras that the customers are purchasing.  High Schools that may have purchases 20 cameras 15 years ago are now in the 100+ camera range.  Not only are customers dramatically increasing camera counts, the IP camera segment is now engaged in full-on Megapixel Race to see who can put out the most robust image-quality camera at the least expensive price.  It is perfect when you think about it: what has always been the number one complaint about CCTV?  BAD VIDEO.  We saw this with the old VHS tapes that were recorded over and over.  We continued to see this with digital video due to low quality analog cameras and capture cards putting out degraded images.  Video quality is the one attribute to video security that all people, regardless of experience, can easily grasp and judge.  Given a choice between a CIF analog image and a 5MP IP image in a side-by-side quality comparison is the quintessential NO BRAINER.  

The problem, and what many security professionals either ignore or (yikes!) don’t understand, is that the 500 lbs gorilla sitting in the corner of the room is named Bandwidth.  Does not matter if you are talking about processing power, storage capability, or network transmission; more cameras with bigger images consume exponentially more resources.  Using Analytics allows you to manage the data that needs to be processed, moved and stored on the system by allowing you to control the what, where, when, and why aspects of this data.   What types of events are you interested in seeing?  Where do you want events to be sent?  When should resolutions and frame-rates be accelerated or reduced?  Why are specific video events more important than the majority of the video I am recording?  Why should I take up valuable network bandwidth when nothing of importance is taking place?  All of this begins with understanding the purpose of the camera that you have installed.  If you understand the purpose there is no reason why video analytics cannot play a fundamental role in resource management.  

Time to Set-up Analytics

One area of the ARTECO product that always gets high praise especially from folks who have a lot of experience with various video analytics products is the ease of use in setting up individual applications.  This is one area of ARTECO-LOGIC that has not changed much in the last five years simply because we really like the way it was thought through and designed.  Basically if you have ever worked with any Microsoft Draw type application you should be able to intuitively understand how to create the zones.  It is a point-to-point design tools that allows you to shape the zone however you want it to look just clicking where ever you want a point to be created.  Your basic set-up for Violated Area can be completed and loaded in less than a minute.  When you turn on the zone you have default settings for the analytics already included.  I have seen some of our more experienced Dealer techs set 8 channel systems up with walk-testing in about 20 minutes.  It really is pretty amazing to see when you consider how much time people say they are spending on competitive systems and often time never are able to get the analytics to work correctly. 

Here is an older video screen capture we use in training presentations to help people understand the concept of what makes a good zone.  You can see it is still the “Blue Version” which pertains to the color of the Arteco logo in the top right.  I really like this video because it clearly demonstrates the creating from scratch, loading and enabling a zone in under a minute.  

At the end of the video, the Violated Area zone is active with default settings for the false alarm filters (short-event filter and min/max % of area primarily).  Defaults settings on these filters work really well for about 85-90% of outdoor applications.  In fact, we argue that the new buzz in video analytics right now, "Self-Learning" is actually as effective as (and not much different) as a few key default settings on false alarm filters.  I will get into this more on a future post because it is a worthy topic.   

If you ever want any help or a refresher on analytics set-up please give us a call.  We have monthly web-based training for technical and user/operator for FREE!  We will be happy to sign you up.

Hard Drive Management and Failover

Arteco is proud to announce our latest feature to ARTECO-SERVER Enterprise VMS software: Disk Management.  This feature allows you to easily assign camera to multiple installed drives.  You can assign manually or select all of your drives and click “Auto Balance” which will evenly distribute your cameras based on the total size of available space.    The really cool (and useful) part of this feature is you can now designate space on any drive as “Spare” storage.  Spare space on the drive is reserved for a fatal event on one of the other drives and the cameras from a failed drive are automatically moved to this space.

Here is how it works:  let’s say you have two 2 TB drives in your server for 16 cameras (Drives D and E for example).  Each drive has 1.5 TB of space available for video recordings and .5 TB dedicated as “Spare” space.   Drive D has cameras 1-8 and Drive E has cameras 9-16 assigned to them.  Over time Drive E begins to fail.  ARTECO-SERVER anticipates that the drive is about to have a fatal flaw and safely moves cameras 9-16 to the “Spare” space available on Drive D.  ARTECO-LOGIC sends server events indicating that Drive E is failing and events indicating that each camera has been moved to the Spare drive. 

Now you can rest assured that video will never be lost due to a hard drive failure in your video surveillance server!!!

If you would like to see a live demo of how this works, give us a call and we can schedule a webex meeting and show you! 

New Built-in Video Wall feature for ARTECO-LOGIC

Most of the VMS platforms on the markets now charge customers for a separate module if the want to take advantage of "Video Wall" capabilities.  These modules are sold as separate software platforms that allow users to display multiple displays from their VMS software on a single or multiple connected monitors.

Arteco is proud to announce our new feature in ARTECO-LOGIC which we refer to as "Floating Windows."  This feature allows you to detach the display grid as a separate window to run on your client PC.  There is no limit to how many floating windows (display grids) you can create.  Even better you can now create your own dimensions for display grids within ARTECO-LOGIC.  This is very useful for 180 and 360 cameras that are using multiple cameras inside the same housing to create a panoramic effect.  The individual windows can be sized and moved around the screen to the user's specification.  Now you can create your own video wall all while running a single instance of ARTECO-LOGIC on your PC.  Pretty cool stuff.... AND PRACTICAL!!!

Here is a screen capture I created on my PC to give you an idea. I have four floating windows plus my session of ARTECO-LOGIC running in the top right corner spanning across two monitors.  Across the bottom of both screens I created a grid that is one row by ten columns.  Just above this grid on the left side of the image you can see an Arecont 8185 (180 degree MP) displayed as a floating window.   I chose to keep my original session of ARTECO-LOGIC up on the monitor because this allows me to still control all of the functionality of the REC/PLAYBACK plus view events as they come in on the Event Log.

Want to try it out?  Give us a call of course or if you have any questions we are available!

PTZ Control inside ARTECO-LOGIC

ARTECO-LOGIC now allows three different ways to control Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras within your video management controls.  The first is "On-Screen" control which allows users to hold "left-click" down on the mouse and drag the PTZ to any direction on the screen.  When you do this there is a red "pointer" line that traces the direction of the movement.  Make the line longer to increase the speed of the movement, or shorter to decrease the speed.  You can also control the optical zoom of the camera with the "scroll-wheel" of the mouse.  Note, once you exhaust the optical zoom distance, the software automatically changes to digital zoom.  You can turn this PTZ control on/off by "right-clicking"  on the selected camera view and choosing PTZ On or PTZ Off.  Above is a demo of the "On-Screen" control.

We have also removed the older "Bomb Site" PTZ control (HOORAY!) and replaced with a virtual "Joystick application.  This works very much like looking directly down at an Atari joystick for those of us old enough to remember.  Click and hold your "left-click" button on your mouse over the handle of the joystick and move in any direction to move the camera.  Note that you can also limit PAN or TILT options in this section.

The third option is also located in this section which is the "Up/Down/Left/Right" arrows below the Joystick.  You can also manually zoom and pull focus.  The "Speed Control" at the bottom of the window allows you to set a maximum speed for the movement by moving the slider bar from left to right where left equals slow and right equals fast.

Please contact us for more information or for any questions regarding controlling your PTZ camera through ARTECO-LOGIC.