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DVR Surveillance

DVR Surveillance Recorders. In just a few short years, DVRs have gone from luxuries to the core of a CCTV surveillance system program. By now, everyone knows the advantages of DVR over VCRs: better images; superior search capability; simultaneous recording, live viewing, and playback; remote access; and easier integration with security systems. When companies claim to have "gone digital," they often mean that they are storing output from analog cameras in digital format with DVR surveillance.

For example, approximately 27 percent of all recorder units sold in the United States in 2000 were digital. By the end of 2002, that number had crept up to 39 percent, he says. Freeman adds that the revenue generated by digital sales will exceed that from analogs for the first time in 2003, but that's because digital units still cost more than their analog counterparts.

Heavy DVR competition means heavy innovation. Not surprisingly, the most significant technological advances are occurring at the higher end of the market. The DVR is moving from a recording box to a sophisticated system loaded with video management features. For example, Dedicated Micros of Reston, Virginia, just introduced a combination DVR/multiplexer; NICE Systems has a DVR that incorporates motion detection and other video content analysis capabilities in its DVRs. And Alpha Systems Lab of Costa Mesa, California, has a DVR that can be bolstered by modular software so an end user doesn't have to scrap an old system when new features are introduced.

One of the most exciting new developments in DVRs, says Damjanovski, is neural network processing, now incorporated into products by Cieffe of Milano, Italy; Dallmeier of Regensburg, Germany; and a few other companies. This function allows security personnel to have the DVR surveillance system automatically look for a specific object that was detected during playback.

The DVR analyzes the color, shape, and size of the object and scours the footage for this object. In addition, DVR surveillance can automatically adjust parameters to an existing situation and learn what counts as normal behavior in that environment. Then it can watch for anything that doesn't fit that model. "Once something extraordinary happens, it will signal an alarm," Damjanovski explains.

Another feature concerns frame rate. DVRs, such as those from NICE and Loronix, can now automatically adjust frame rate of stored video based on preset conditions. For example, with DVR surveillance a business might record public areas at 3.75 frames per second but set the system to record at 15 frames per second if the DRV's motion detection picks up a certain type of movement. DVTel's system, for its part, records and views images at different rates. NICE's solution also allows users to define specific areas in the picture where superior quality is desired, such as a money-counting area in a bank.

Another advance is to enhance the DVR's ability to integrate data from sources other than the camera. For example, DVRS are integrating point-of-sale (POS) transactions. Dedicated Micros, for example, is working with partners to integrate POS data-mining with the DVR. Also working on POS integration is cVideo of San Diego.

Nelson Faller, vice president of sales for cVideo, explains that, historically, transaction data have been overlain on videotape, which obscured the image. Moreover, footage could only be searched by time period. By contrast, he says, cVideo's DVR has a parallel port dedicated to integrate information from multiple cash registers. Transaction text is placed in a bar on the side of the screen, not over video.

The DVR surveillance system can retrieve footage by criteria such as time and date, cashier, receipt number, transaction type, credit card, product, and brand name. The goal is for a central monitor to be able to proactively create reports for retailers on cash-register activity, such as overrings, Faller says.

Early feedback on one video/POS system has been encouraging. Mike Shearon, owner of three 7-Eleven stores in the San Diego area, recently replaced one store's analog video system, which featured POS information overlaid on videotape, with a cVideo digital system. While the shrink rate at his stores is below the chain's national average, Shearon says, he wanted to reduce it even more and, as importantly, instill in employees an awareness of the importance of accuracy in transactions.

Since the DVR surveillance/POS system was installed at the beginning of the year, it has impressed Shearon with its fast and flexible searching and retrieval. If he notices an item missing, such as a lighter from a counter display, he can enter the product number in the system to find out if and when it was sold. He can then input the time and transaction, and the system will show the video of the transaction. With the analog systems at his other two stores, tape has to be searched manually.

Besides searching by any number of criteria, Shearon adds, the system can generate graphs of employee activity, documenting all transactions and creating comparisons between employees that might show differences in oversales or undersales, for example.

The new system has alleviated storage concerns as well. At the stores with analog systems, Sherman rotates 60 tapes at each store to retain one month of footage. Recording at the same rate, a single CD can capture two months of video, Shearon says. The space-saving benefit is important in a tight convenience-store environment, he says. Plus, he can review live and stored footage from home.

Shearon says he believes that the DVR surveillance system is a good deterrent. "After educating the personnel on what it's capable of doing, accuracy has increased tremendously," he says. "It also sends the message that we're watching everything."

POS integration is only one advance. Improvements in traditional DVR functions-such as compression, video quality, storage, and retrieval--have also been noteworthy, says Wilson. Despite these advances, however, there are still capabilities that are not yet available. These are on the industry experts' "wish list" for DVR surveillance.

"The DVR's biggest problem is video database management," says Bordes. "That's the next hurdle for the industry."

For example, DVRS by companies such as Loronix can now strip away frames from stored video as that video ages. So video originally recorded at 30 frames per second can be stripped down to perhaps 1.75 frames per second after, say, 12 months of storage.

Stripping frames of data is a nice advance, but the footage still takes up significant space on the hard drive, says Bordes. Finding a way to eliminate irrelevant footage entirely would be better, he says. If only 2 of i6 cameras that are programmed to run around the clock capture relevant activity, the security manager might want the system to know to purge the 14 inactive cameras as well as the irrelevant material on the other two cameras. Today's DVR surveillance systems can't do that, he says.

Storage is another area where great strides have been made--for example, Dedicated Micros' DVR can now store 1 terabyte--but other storage media, such as AIT (advanced intelligent tape) and RAID (redundant array of independent disks) may offer better alternatives for long-time archiving.

As long as they are networked into the system, these archive media can share the features of the DVR, such as POS integration and object tracking. For example, a DVR might hold only 30 days of high-quality footage. Archived data (data removed from the DVR hard drive and placed onto another long-term medium) could still be retrieved in the same ways that the data on the DVR hard drive could.

Stability of operating systems has also been flagged as a concern. JeanPaul Saindon, president of SmartSight of Laval, Canada, notes that many DVRs for DVR surveillance systems run Windows operating systems, which experts say are prone to crash given the heavy amount of work the DVR is asked to do.

Damjanovski says that Linux is far more stable than Windows. He discerns a "slow but certain shift" by manufacturers toward Linux.

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