How to choose a video surveillance system

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Sooner or later, this happens with every company: you will need a new video surveillance system. This may be the system that you are installing for the first time or a cloud upgrade of existing cameras – in any case, you need to do something to strengthen control. And while you will be occupied with the functions and advantages of various technologies, the financial service will be interested in the issue of return on investment.

It is easy to imagine that modern video surveillance is simple, convenient and reliable. But is it profitable? How many thousands need to be paid for “simply”, “conveniently”, “reliably”? How to beat off investments? Today we will look at how to choose a video surveillance system to correlate costs with benefits, and show some calculators that will help you quickly navigate the requirements for cameras and video archives.

What to consider when choosing a video surveillance

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The system you choose should, at a minimum, not be a loss-making solution. Consider a completely ordinary case in a small business. CCTV system (together with the service face recognition) helped guards detain 15% more shoplifters. The average cost of damage from each thief is 5,000 rubles, and the number of annual incidents is 80. An increase in security efficiency by 15% additionally saves the business 60,000 rubles — this is the amount that can already be taken into account when calculating investments.

Video surveillance is not a one-time story, limited to one set of functions. The benefits grow annually as opportunities expand. You can recognize the faces of people from the “black list” or loyal customers, take into account working hours, control cash transactions, analyze the flow of visitors – all on one camera. At the same time, the constant costs (on cloud solutions) will be: electricity, Internet, tariff plan. That’s all, actually – in the cloud for clients there are no expenses for registrars, recording devices and depreciation.

What tasks need to be solved

This should be your first question when choosing a system. The reasons for installing video surveillance will determine what features are needed and how many cameras you need to install.

In the experience of Ivideon, video surveillance tasks are often identical across companies. Common camera practices include:

  • Theft control – the visible cameras themselves are a deterrent and can prevent theft.
  • Video evidence of emergency – video surveillance provides real information about various incidents.
  • Third-party monitoring – the ability to monitor objects from anywhere in the world.
  • Employee control – contactless admission to the premises by face, accounting for working hours, delimitation of access rights at the facility, control of the layout of goods.
  • Cash operations control – prevention of fraudulent actions of the cashier with video confirmation.
  • Customer flow analysis – counting visitors; recognition of emotions, demographics and gender; queue detection; work with loyal customers through integration with CRM.

What are the system requirements

You may have different camera requirements for different areas. For example, night vision distance may be a key factor for outdoor surveillance.

It is also worth immediately deciding how the work with analytics will be carried out. For several years, cameras with built-in analytical modules have been present on the market. Solutions of this class can save on traffic, which is important when deploying systems at facilities with limited bandwidth of communication channels. Of the minuses, one can note the high price, complicated and expensive maintenance. Updating and scaling a system built on the basis of local analytics is also difficult.

To connect a video surveillance system, you can use a digital video recorder (DVR), a network video recorder (NVR), hybrid devices (like Ivideon Bridge), a PC, or use the built-in firmware of the cameras themselves. Analog cameras are connected to the DVR – recordings are processed directly on the device. NVRs work with IP cameras, both over the wire and wirelessly. Hybrid devices work with any cameras. Cameras that have built-in support for the cloud or video analytics only need a stable Internet channel.

However, when choosing equipment in traditional video surveillance systems, it must be borne in mind that not all devices are compatible with each other. For example, some NVRs are compatible with IP cameras of only certain manufacturers.

One of the key features of a video surveillance system is storage capacity. In the case of cloud storage of records, the question disappears by itself – there are no restrictions on traffic, and the storage period of a record depends only on the number of available days on the tariff plan. When choosing a local recording on the register, PC or on the camera’s SD card, you need to consider in advance how much memory is needed. The answer depends on several factors – we will consider in more detail in the section with calculators.

The price of the solution will depend on all these parameters, as well as on any other functions that you can choose. Given this fact, it is not surprising that the cost of video surveillance systems for small businesses can vary by an order of magnitude.

Storage and traffic calculators

The system of 4 IP cameras, which works 24 hours a day, with a resolution of 2 megapixels and a frequency of 5 frames / sec, generates 2.79 terabytes of MJPEG video on the NVR. Even one constant video stream with a frequency of 20 frames / sec and a minimum resolution of 704 × 480 can fill a 1 TB disk in 42 days.

In the simplest case, you can determine the amount of memory by resolution, number of cameras and the time during which you want to save the footage. You can check here, here or here.

The trouble is that these calculators (and many others) give different results when entering the same parameters! Fortunately there are formula, which allows you to personally obtain data close to the truth:

Storage space (GB) = bitrate (Kbps) * 1000/8 * 3600 * 24 * Cameras * Days / 1,000,000,000

Where:
• 1000/8 = convert to bytes;
• 3600 = convert from seconds to an hour;
• 24 = convert from hour to day;
• Cameras = total number of cameras;
• Days = total number of days to record.

If you have 2 cameras, the maximum speed of which is 1024 Kbps, and you want to record 7 days without interruption, then:

Required disk space = 1024 * 1000/8 * 3600 * 24 * 2 * 7/1000 000 000 = 154.8288 GB

You can also use the formula calculating the network bandwidth for the IP camera, which will help to calculate the requirements for the speed of the Internet channel:

Bandwidth (Mbps) = Bitrate (main) * N + Bitrate (sub) * M

Where:
• N & M – the number of IP cameras for the main stream and sub-stream.

As for the bit rate, you can find it in the technical specifications of IP cameras.

Example: if you have one IP camera with a main stream of 6144 kbps and another with a substream of 1024 kbps, the required bandwidth will be:

Required bandwidth = 1 * 6144 kbit / s + 1 * 1024 kbit / s = 7.168 Mbit / s.

Other calculators for video surveillance systems

The University of Florida (USA) conducts the annual National Retail Security Survey (NRSS) to anonymously collect retail sales loss figures. This study has become the basis calculator return on investment for video surveillance systems. By the way, according to NRSS, 25% of retail losses can be prevented using a conventional video surveillance system (even without face recognition).

Convenient calculator lenses With a fixed focal length, you can determine which lens on the camera suits you.

Following calculator when choosing lenses, it also takes into account usage scenarios.

Use this tool to compare the frame rate settings in the DVR and you will see how lowering the frame rate affects the smoothness of the video.

Finally, it is worth mentioning professional software, which is used in installation organizations. Using these solutions, companies automate most of the routine tasks of engineers and clearly demonstrate to the customer what he will get as a result of installing the cameras. If you have free time and interest, you can familiarize yourself with the settings IPVM Camera Calculator, CCTV Design Lens Calculator or Jvsg.

Instead of a conclusion

This article is written based on communication with real customers who have chosen the path of self-selection of cameras. The further they went, the more problems they encountered on their way. Some even got a decent result. Others, after some time, faced a growth problem – once the installed system could no longer adequately scale and solve the entire pool of overgrown tasks.

Ivideon doesn’t just sell cameras or connect to the cloud. We are already doing turnkey video surveillance, just for those cases when there are more questions to the future project than answers can be found (or when the answers begin to contradict each other). Simply write to uswhat you want to get. Cloud surveillance begins with one (any) camera.

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