CCTV: A BOON FOR THE SMOOTH CHECK

CCTV cameras were originally meant only to record video, but the sheer number of cameras, the quantity of knowledge, and security and enforcement requirements have led CCTV equipment manufacturers to raise the stakes and supply a good array of advanced features.

Some of these features are relevant to all CCTV users and recommended (or required) by anyone who wishes to deploy a CCTV camera. Others are only relevant to some users.

So, let’s search the most important ones and see where they are beneficial or relevant:

Advantages of CCTV

1.Motion Detection

The on-demand recording is one of the foremost useful features in modern CCTV systems. It is especially useful in frequently-accessed areas, where constant recording throughout the day will provide you with tens of hours of footage of a door and perhaps thirty seconds of people coming and going.

CCTV systems with motion detection support allow you to configure your camera to start recording only its detected motion within its field of view. This way, only footage that contains relevant data are going to be stored. This saves you money on storage, substitute and archiving, and makes it simpler to scan and recover data once you need it.

Infra-Red Lighting

Like all cameras, CCTV cameras can only record objects if there's some amount of sunshine shining on them. However, this light needs to not be within the color spectrum.

Infra-red CCTV cameras have integrated infra-red LEDs, which they will use to illuminate the objects in their field of view. This allows CCTVs to “keep a watch" during the night, too.

You will often see these cameras sold as “day/night CCTV cameras”. Day/night CCTV cameras automatically detect the ambient light level and switch the Infra-Red LEDs on and off as required.

Infra-red CCTV cameras use cheap, widely available components, so infra-red capabilities don't necessarily add much to your camera’s price. However, you ought to steer beyond the cheaper models, which frequently have insufficient illumination levels, or which cannot adjust the illumination level automatically (or at all), resulting in poor-quality footage.

Two-Way Audio

Two-way Audio is one of the more neglected advanced CCTV features. Two-way audio allows the worker in the control room to converse with the person in front of the CCTV camera. The conversation itself is often recorded and archived, a bit like the other quiet footage.

Two-way audio is primarily useful for interactive access control systems, where access to a restricted area should be confirmed or controlled by a person's operator. However, it is helpful in other situations as well.

Real-Time Alerts

Real-time alerts (sometimes called push notifications) are a comparatively new feature of IP-enabled CCTV cameras. CCTV systems that help this feature can assign an alert to a smartphone or tablet in response to certain events, such as detecting motion.

Real-time alerts are a very useful CCTV feature, but they should be deployed with care.

First, a system that issues too many unnecessary alerts will quickly bury the ineffective alerts during a stream of inappropriate material — which tends to *decrease*, instead of increasing security, as everyone will quickly find themselves assuming that each alert is bogus.

Second, push notifications may look simple, but they believe in very complex cloud technology. Some will rely on their manufacturers’ foundation to relay the alerts to your equipment, which makes you dependent on their security and uptime. Others allow you to expand your infrastructure — which makes you less reliant on third-party tools, but the infrastructure is yours to deploy and, especially, to secure.

Cloud Storage

Storing CCTV data securely that also enables swift and adequate access to camera data is among the most difficult challenges that CCTV users face.

Cloud storage is primarily aimed toward two sorts of users:

· Users who have an outsized number of departments to manage and therefore the supporting infrastructure is just too large and difficult to manage, even with dedicated IT resources

· Users who have very few streams to manage and few advanced requirements, so the costs associated with dedicated, in-house infrastructure for secure storage and back-up are hard to justify

With cloud storage, CCTV systems will use cloud resources to save and recover data. This outsources the task of keeping a secure and redundant storage infrastructure, with all the advantages and shortcomings that ensue.

CCTV cloud storage from reputable partners uses state-of-the-art encryption, high availability, and efficient backup capabilities, that typically go beyond what most small and medium businesses can afford.

That being said, some of the systems’ security is still dependent on your security practices; for example, an attacker can still gain access to your footage if you use weak passwords. Cloud storage also involves a trade-off between infrastructure maintenance and price, and vendor independence; a given cloud platform only works with some CCTV cameras.

Wireless Connectivity

Traditionally, CCTV cameras have used wire connections, essentially because wireless protocols were deemed either too unreliable or too slow for real-time video monitoring. This is not the case, and lots of CCTV cameras offer wireless connectivity instead.

Wireless CCTVs use Wi-Fi to speak with the remainder of the safety system so that they don’t need any data cables. This can tremendously simplify your infrastructure (and its installation!) and improves your security system’s reliability, together with less cable means one less failure point.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Modern CCTV systems have a good range of features that transcend mere video monitoring and recording. CCTV cameras have video analytics features like face recognition, ANPR, and object classification, also as various storage- and monitoring-related features like cloud storage and real-time alerts.

Depending on your business requirements, the importance of these features can range from “easy” to “critical”. But even when nothing is added to the price tag, they are no free lunch: correctly using these features can come with its own set of technical, and sometimes even legal challenges.