Arteco US Signs Deal with Stenarco Solutions

Arteco is pleased to announce that Stenarco Solutions will represent Arteco in the Mid-South Region of the United States with exclusive selling rights to the Arteco product line in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  Based in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Stenarco is Sales and Marketing Rep Firm headed up by industry veteran Stephen Homrighaus. 

We are very excited to be partnering with Stephen and Stenarco Solutions, his extensive background in all aspects of the security industry and the changes in IP based security solutions is a perfect fit for driving the adoption of the Arteco product line.  

Please join us in welcoming Stephen and his team at Stenarco Solutions!  You can reach Stephen at (817) 357-2829.  For more information on Stenarco Solutions, please visit www.stenarco.com  

Lunch and Learn in Jacksonville, FL

Arteco will be hosting a Lunch & Learn event in Jacksonville, FL at Maggiano's Little Italy restaurant in St. John's Town Center with our premiere partner Compass Tech Systems on March 8, 2012.

This is a great opportunity to share details on our application with the people in the field who deal with the types of real-world scenarios that Intelligent Video is helping to solve on a daily basis.  We love these events because it not only allows us to present and demo our product solution but it also provides great insight into the Manufacturer/Integrator/End-user dynamic that really drives success in our industry.  Without partners like Compass Tech Systems who are dedicated to service and perfection, and work every day to earn the trust of their valued customers, manufacturers are hard-pressed to be successful.

Please join us, we look forward to seeing you there for some great Italian food and insightful conversation.  For more information please contact Stephanie Evans at sevans@compasstechsys.com or by phone (904) 253-7960.  Reserve your spot today, SPACE IS LIMITED!!  

Analytics Use: What is the Purpose?

People always ask: “Where should I use analytics?”  Our answer: anywhere you hang a camera.  Listen, every camera that is ever installed should have a reason it was selected with that specific field of view.  We refer to this as the camera’s “purpose.”  The goal of analytics is to detect when the purpose happens while ignoring everything else. 

Roughly 85-90% of analytics applications used today fall under what we refer to as “Area Analytics” which can be defined loosely as “Something, some place, longer than you want it to be there.”  This means there is not only a size and shape of the object but also a temporal value to that object’s occupation of the space.  This could be 0.1 seconds or it could by 3 minutes for example and defines the type of event that the user is interested in.   We could not care about people walking up and down a path all day long but when they stop in a specific area for a significant time interval, we want to know.  Using built-in filters to the software allow you to shape and define what will create an event and what will be ignored. 

The key to understanding when, where or how to use analytics is rooted in understanding the purpose of the camera you have installed.   For the vast majority of real-world cameras, the purpose is to detect some form or trespassing.  This is a match made in heaven for a true video analytics-based solution.  Why do you ask?  Well I got into all sorts of trouble on another blog site (any guesses) a couple years ago when I stated that area analytics are the easiest to set-up, require the least amount of time for tuning, and give the most accurate detection of any analytics application on the market.  Now I was not referring strictly to Arteco, but to all true machine-vision based video analytics platforms on the market. My research came from speaking with various manufacturers as well as integrator technicians who have installed and set-up leading applications.  To anyone who has experience setting up applications, there is a tangible and significant difference between the time/complication to set up a violated area and speed threshold detection (for example). 

The reason I say this is a perfect match for analytics now is because it is an application that is commercially viable in the industry.  It is a marriage of what is needed in the market (a way to streamline video resources for trespassing) and an application that gives high rates of accuracy with the least amount of set-up pain.    There are all sorts of examples of in recent years of applications and sales models that do not work well when it comes to video analytics.  By focusing on understanding the purpose of the camera and what the customer’s expectation of what they are trying to achieve with that specific field of view , we easily understand how to use video analytics applications to help increase the efficiency and effectives of the security profile.  

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!