Video surveillance

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) is the use of video cameras to transmit a

signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors.

It differs from broadcast television in that the signal is not openly transmitted,
though it may employ point to point (P2P), point to multipoint, or mesh wireless
links. CCTV is often used for surveillance in areas that may need monitoring such
as banks, casinos, airports, military installations, and convenience stores. It is also
an important tool for distance education.

In industrial plants, CCTV equipment may be used to observe parts of a process

from a central control room, for example when the environment is not suitable for
humans. CCTV systems may operate continuously or only as required to monitor a
particular event. A more advanced form of CCTV, utilizing Digital Video
Recorders (DVRs), provides recording for possibly many years, with a variety of
quality and performance options and extra features (such as motion-detection and
email alerts). More recently, decentralized IP-based CCTV cameras, some
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equipped with megapixel sensors, support recording directly to network-attached

storage devices, or internal flash for completely stand-alone operation.

Surveillance of the public using CCTV is particularly common in the UK, where
there are reportedly more cameras per person than in any other country in the
world. There and elsewhere, its increasing use has triggered a debate about security
versus privacy.

History

Sign warning that premises are watched by CCTV cameras

The first CCTV system was installed by Siemens AG at Test Stand VII in
Peenemunde, Germany in 1942, for observing the launch of V-2 rockets The noted
German engineer Walter Bruch was responsible for the design and installation of
the system.

CCTV recording systems are still often used at modern launch sites to record the
flight of the rockets, in order to find the possible causes of malfunctions, while
larger rockets are often fitted with CCTV allowing pictures of stage separation to
be transmitted back to earth by radio link.
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In September 1968, Olean, New York was the first city in the United States to
install video cameras along its main business street in an effort to fight crime. the
use of closed-circuit TV cameras piping images into the Olean Police Department
propelled Olean to the forefront of crime-fighting technology.

The use of CCTV later on became very common in banks and stores to discourage
theft, by recording evidence of criminal activity. Their use further popularized the
concept. The first place to use CCTV in the United Kingdom was King's Lynn,
Norfolk.

In recent decades, especially with general crime fears growing in the 1990s and
2000s, public space use of surveillance cameras has taken off, especially in some
countries such as the United Kingdom.

Technological developments

Surveillance camera with a wiper for clear images during rain

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Computerized monitoring

The first closed-circuit television cameras used in public spaces were crude, conspicuous,
low definition black and white systems without the ability to zoom or pan. Modern
CCTV cameras use small high definition colour cameras that can not only focus to
resolve minute detail, but by linking the control of the cameras to a computer, objects can
be tracked semi-automatically. The technology that enables this is often referred to as
Video Content Analysis (VCA), and is currently being developed by a large number of
technological companies around the world. The current technology enables the systems to
recognize if a moving object is a walking person, a crawling person or a vehicle. It can
also determine the color of the object. NEC claim to have a system that can identify a
person's age by evaluating a picture of him/her. Other technologies claim to be able to
identify people by their biometrics.

CCTV monitoring station

The system identifies where a person is, how he is moving and whether he is a person or
for instance a car. Based on this information the system developers implement features
such as blurring faces or "virtual walls" that block the sight of a camera where it is not
allowed to film. It is also possible to provide the system with rules, such as for example
"sound the alarm whenever a person is walking close to that fence" or in a museum "set
off an alarm if a painting is taken down from the wall".

VCA can also be used for forensics after the film has been made. It is then possible to
search for certain actions within the recorded video. For example if you know a criminal
is driving a yellow car, you can set the system to search for yellow cars and the system
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will provide you with a list of all the times where there is a yellow car visible in the
picture. These conditions can be made more precise by searching for "a person moving
around in a certain area for a suspicious amount of time", for example if someone is
standing around an ATM machine without using it.

Surveillance camera outside a McDonalds highway drive-in

Maintenance of CCTV systems is important in case forensic examination is necessary

after a crime has been committed.

In crowds the system is limited to finding anomalies, for instance a person moving in the
opposite direction to the crowd, which might be a case in airports where passengers are
only supposed to walk in one direction out of a plane, or in a subway where people are
not supposed to exit through the entrances.

VCA also has the ability to track people on a map by calculating their position from the
images. It is then possible to link many cameras and track a person through an entire
building or area. This can allow a person to be followed without having to analyze many
hours of film. Currently the cameras have difficulty identifying individuals from video
alone, but if connected to a key-card system, identities can be established and displayed
as a tag over their heads on the video.
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Monitoring station of a small office building

There is also a significant difference in where the VCA technology is placed, either the
data is being processed within the cameras (on the edge) or by a centralized server. Both
technologies have their pros and cons.

The implementation of automatic number plate recognition produces a potential source of

information on the location of persons or groups.

There is no technological limitation preventing a network of such cameras from tracking

the movement of individuals. Reports have also been made of plate recognition
misreading numbers leading to the billing of the entirely wrong person. In the UK, car
cloning is a crime where, by altering, defacing or replacing their number plates with
stolen ones, perpetrators attempt to avoid speeding and congestion charge fines and even
to steal petrol from garage forecourts.

CCTV critics see the most disturbing extension to this technology as the recognition of
faces from high-definition CCTV images. This could determine a person's identity
without alerting him that his identity is being checked and logged. The systems can check
many thousands of faces in a database in under a second.
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The combination of CCTV and facial recognition has been tried as a form of mass
surveillance, but has been ineffective because of the low discriminating power of facial
recognition technology and the very high number of false positives generated. This type
of system has been proposed to compare faces at airports and seaports with those of
suspected terrorists or other undesirable entrants.

Eye-in-the-sky surveillance dome camera watching from a high steel

pole

Computerized monitoring of CCTV images is under development, so that a human

CCTV operator does not have to endlessly look at all the screens, allowing an operator to
observe many more CCTV cameras. These systems do not observe people directly.
Instead they track their behavior by looking for particular types of body movement
behavior, or particular types of clothing or baggage.

The theory behind this is that in public spaces people behave in predictable ways. People
who are not part of the 'crowd', for example car thieves, do not behave in the same way.
The computer can identify their movements, and alert the operator that they are acting out
of the ordinary. Recently in the latter part of 2006, news reports on UK television brought
to light newly developed technology that uses microphones in conjunction with CCTV

If a person is observed to be shouting in an aggressive manner (e.g., provoking a fight),

the camera can automatically zoom in and pinpoint the individual and alert a camera
operator. Of course this then lead to the discussion that the technology can also be used to
eavesdrop and record private conversations from a reasonable distance (e.g., 100 meters
or about 330 feet)
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The same type of system can track identified individuals as they move through the area
covered by CCTV. Such applications have been introduced in the early 2000s, mainly in
the USA, France, Israel and Australia. With software tools, the system is able to develop
three-dimensional models of an area, and to track and monitor the movement of objects
within it.

To many, the development of CCTV in public areas, linked to computer databases of

people's pictures and identity, presents a serious breach of civil liberties. Critics fear the
possibility that one would not be able to meet anonymously in a public place or drive and
walk anonymously around a city. Demonstrations or assemblies in public places could be
affected as the state would be able to collate lists of those leading them, taking part, or
even just talking with protesters in the street.

Retention, storage and preservation

The long-term storage and archiving of CCTV recordings is an issue of concern in the
implementation of a CCTV system. Re-usable media such as tape may be cycled through
the recording process at regular intervals. There are statutory limits on retention of data.

Recordings are kept for several purposes. Firstly, the primary purpose for which they
were created (e.g. to monitor a facility). Secondly, they need to be preserved for a
reasonable amount of time to recover any evidence of other important activity they might
document (e.g. a group of people passing a facility the night a crime was committed).
Finally, the recordings may be evaluated for historical, research or other long-term
information of value they may contain (e.g. samples kept to help understand trends for a
business or community).

Recordings are more commonly stored using hard disk drives in lieu of video cassette
recorders. The quality of digital recordings is subject to compression ratios, images stored
per second, image size and duration of image retention before being overwritten.
Different vendors of digital video recorders use different compression standards and
varying compression ratios.
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Closed-circuit digital photography (CCDP)

A development in the world of CCTV (October 2005) is in the use of megapixel digital
still cameras that can take 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution images of the camera scene either
on a time lapse or motion detection basis. Images taken with a digital still camera have
higher resolution than those taken with a typical video camera. Relatively low-cost digital
still cameras can be used for CCTV purposes, using CCDP software that controls the
camera from the PC.

Images of the camera scene are transferred automatically to a computer every few
seconds. Images may be monitored remotely if the computer is connected to a network.

Combinations of PIR activated floodlights with 1.3Mpix and better digital cameras are
now appearing. They save the images to a flash memory card which is inserted into a slot
on the device. The flash card can be removed for viewing on a computer if ever an
incident happens. They are not intended for live viewing, but are a very simple and cheap
"install and forget" approach to this issue.

Closed-circuit digital photography (CCDP) is more suited for capturing and saving
recorded photographs, whereas closed-circuit television (CCTV) is more suitable for live
monitoring purposes.

IP cameras
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Easy Connect Wireless IP camera

A growing branch in CCTV is internet protocol cameras (IP cameras). IP Cameras use
the IP protocol, used by most LANs to transmit video across data networks in digital
form. As its IP, video can also, but not necessarily, be transmitted across the public
Internet, which allow homeowners and businesses to view their camera(s) through any
internet connection available through a computer or a 3G phone. For professional or
public infrastructure applications, IP video would always be restricted to within a private
network or VPN.

Internet protocol is a protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched

network using the internet protocol suite, also referred to as TCP/IP.

Potential advantages

The following are potential advantages of IP cameras over traditional cameras:

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• Two-way audio via a single network cable, allowing users to communicate with
what they are seeing (e.g. gas station clerk assisting a customer on how to use the
prepay pumps)
• Higher image resolution: IP cameras have a resolution of at least 640x480 and can
provide multi-megapixel resolution and HDTV image quality at 30 frames per
second.
• Flexibility: IP cameras can be moved around anywhere on an IP network
(including wireless).
• Distributed intelligence: with IP cameras, video analytics can be placed in the
camera itself allowing scalability in analytics solutions.
• Transmission of commands for PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) cameras via a single network
cable.
• Encryption & authentication: IP cameras offer secure data transmission through
encryption and authentication methods such as WEP, WPA, WPA2, TKIP, and
AES.
• Remote accessibility: live video can be viewed from any computer, anywhere, and
also from many mobile devices
• Cost-advantage for larger systems. Studies show that for systems with less than 16
cameras, analog technology is cheaper, between 16 and 32 they are equal, and
beyond 32 cameras, IP-based systems are more cost-effective.
• IP cameras are also able to function on a wireless network. Initial configuration
has to be done through a router; after the IP camera is installed it can then be used
on the wireless network.
• These cameras are used in navigation purpose in defence forces.
• PoE - Power over Ethernet. Modern IP cameras have the ability to operate without
an additional power supply. They can work with the PoE-protocol which gives
power via the Ethernet-cable.

Potential disadvantages

Potential weaknesses of IP cameras in comparison to other CCTV cameras include:

• Higher initial cost per camera, except where cheap webcams are used.
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• Lack of standards. Different IP cameras may encode video differently or use a

different programming interface, thus requiring matching the camera with the
recorder.
• High network bandwidth requirements: a typical CCTV camera with resolution of
640x480 pixels and 10 frames per second (10 frame/s) in MJPEG mode requires
about 3 Mbit/s.
• Technical barrier. Installation for IP cameras requires network settings including
IP address, DDNS, router setting and port forwarding, calling for the skills of a
LAN technician or a CCTV tech who has studied these things.
• If video is transmitted over the Internet, it results in a circuit being less closed than
in classic CCTV. The system becomes open to hacking and hoaxing via internet
(false bomb threats being called in while hoaxers watch on web, etc.). Criminals
can hack into a facility's CCTV system to observe security measures and
personnel, thereby facilitating criminal acts and rendering the IP technology
counterproductive.

Networking CCTV cameras

Small closed circuit television network

A CCTV system allows multiple authorities to view and control CCTV cameras in real
time. The system allows authorities to share CCTV images between them. It uses a
network protocol called Television Network Protocol to allow access to many more
cameras than each individual system owner could afford to run and maintain.
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A big network format

Integrated Systems
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An integrated system unit

Integrated Systems allow users to connect remotely from the internet and view what their
cameras are viewing remotely, similar to that of IP cameras. In one incident, a lady from
Boynton Beach, Florida was able to watch her house get robbed and contacted police
directly from her office at work.

Secure hotels require more than just CCTV cameras

Closed-circuit television cameras are being used more than ever in the hotel industry, but
they're not a solution for all problems related to crime or loss prevention. And in some
cases, they might do more harm than good.

As technology improves and the cameras and equipment become more widespread
throughout several industries, prices have declined.

"A color camera now costs what a black-and-white camera cost several years ago,"

"Digital recording has come down in cost, and the storage capacity has increased."

Despite its increased usage, CCTV isn't a solution for every problem. There are three
main reasons to install CCTV cameras in a hotel--to protect customers, protect assets or
control access.
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"Each officer is assigned a certain number of cameras to monitor. They have to look at all
the cameras, but not at every camera every second. Some cameras are in an automatic
rotation and some are not activated unless there is motion."

For example, cameras monitor staircases because some people attempt to stage a fall,
sustain an injury and sue. Cameras covering gaming activity will be monitored
continuously.

"There's no need to monitor a camera that is monitoring an empty hallway or staircase,"

The resort uses a few CCTV cameras to monitor employee activity at lesser-used exit
areas, or to monitor equipment, such as its fleet of 500 golf carts.

Hospitality

Video surveillance is a great security solution for hospitality and large events. As hotels,
conventions and large events like job fairs and music festivals have become more and
more popular; security has become a top priority for managers and organizers. More
flexible than ever before, security cameras are bringing many new benefits for the
hospitality industry, including: your Hospitality surveillance needs?
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• Guest security – Cameras can help to protect your guests and their
property by deterring theft and vandalism, and helping you identify
those who do break in.
• Area/Building security – Many festivals and hotels have problems
with uninvited or unregistered guests using services like pools and
restrooms. Security cameras placed around your perimeter and in
strategic locations around your building or area can help prevent
unwanted guests from stealing services or causing a disruption.
• Easy to install – Video surveillance systems that use IP (Internet
Protocol) cameras are easy to install – all you do is install the router or
camera manager and mount the cameras – no technicians required.
• Flexibility – Digital technology has given video surveillance the
flexibility to secure almost any kind of event. Systems of IP cameras
can be reconfigured according to security needs and are perfect for
conventions and conferences.
• Remote monitoring - The addition of an NVR (network video
recorder) to your video surveillance system allows you to broadcast
your security footage over the internet, giving you the power to check
any of your security cameras at any time, from any internet connection
(including many cell phones).

Hotels and Motels

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Video surveillance is the perfect security solution for hotels, motels, resorts and other
types of paid lodging. With the demand for hotel rooms and space constantly increasing,
the security of guests, hotel property and employees has become more important than
ever. A carefully considered system of security cameras can help secure your hotel or
resort and give your guests the peace of mind they deserve.

How Hotel Video Surveillance can be Beneficial

• Security – Video surveillance can help keep your guests safe from
theft and other criminals by helping you track your visitors and prevent
break-ins on your property.
• Prevent theft – Security cameras can help keep intruders out of
exclusive hotel areas like swimming pools and gyms, where theft is
common. A surveillance system in your store room and other
maintenance areas can uncover potential employee theft.
• Remain competitive – Along with providing security, a professional
video surveillance system gives your guests peace of mind while
staying at your hotel, and can help you increase your return business
and remain competitive in an aggressive market.
• Flexible – Modern security cameras are easy to install and can be
adjusted at anytime to fit your needs. Unlike analog CCTV cameras,
wireless IP cameras don't require technicians, power tools, or miles of
wiring. All you do is mount the cameras and start recording.
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• Remote monitoring – Adding an NVR (Network Video Recorder) to

your security camera system gives you the ability to broadcast your
surveillance footage over the internet. This breakthrough in
surveillance technology allows you to monitor any of your cameras at
any time from any internet connection, giving you instant security
updates.

Potential Risks of Motel Security Cameras

• Privacy – Protect the privacy of your guests and employees by
keeping your surveillance cameras in public places like lobbies,
restaurants, pool and spa areas, and meeting areas, and out of guest
rooms and break rooms.
• Damage – Cameras, especially when they are outdoors, can be
damaged by storms or falling objects. While this kind of damage is
rare, it's important to keep a secondary security system in place to
protect your guests and property should they occur.
• Outages – Power disruptions or surges can cause interruptions in
recording or damage to your system.

Questions to Ask When Configuring Lodging Security

Cameras
Your hotel or resort's specific security needs depend on many factors.
Consider each of the following when you are purchasing and configuring your
surveillance system:

• Where do you experience the most thefts?

• Have you ever wished that you caught something on camera?
• How do you currently manage security at your hotel?
• Do you feel like your surrounding area contributes to your overall
security?
• How would you describe your average guest?
o Business travelers
o Leisure travelers
o Families
• How is your hotel or resort laid out?
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o Single building housing guest rooms, amenities like pool and spa,
and facilities.
o Several buildings spread out over a large property
• Have you ever had issues with employee theft?

Setup advice for Inn, Bed and Breakfast and Resort CCTV
Systems

• Place cameras in near entrances and exits so you get a clear picture
of each guest or visitor.
• Cameras in open areas like lobbies, pools, and meeting rooms can
help prevent petty theft.
• For valuable items like safes and artwork, fixed cameras near the
object can help prevent theft.
• Cameras placed around your hotel's perimeter can help secure your
building and facilities in dangerous neighborhoods.