A webinar hosted by Arecont Vision highlighted their involvement in upgrading Fremont Banks cameras from analog to IP and various methods to improve bit rates.
Arecont Vision recently hosted a webinar about their latest company status and achievements. One of the focus was about upgrading Fremont Banks' video surveillance systems with IP cameras to meet current security standards.
Located across the San Francisco Bay Area in California, Fremont Bank has been named one of the top workplaces for six consecutive years. Being a well-established bank, it required upgrades to its video surveillance system to meet banking compliance regulations and provide safety, theft prevention as well as prevent other losses.
The old system was a mix of analog cameras with low resolution that was not ideal for providing quality forensic level imagery. Parker Security & Lock was tasked by the bank to be its systems integrators. Parker made a set of criteria that must be met in order for the manufacturer to be selected for the project. On the top of the list was superior technical support from the company. It must have high quality when it comes to components to achieve the best forensic views. They were also looking for support directly from Arecont Vision. Lastly, it needed to be a bullet-proof solution that provides live viewing from a central monitoring station and on-demand video 24/7.
After the evaluation process, which included a presentation of the integration of a video management system based on customer choice, Parker selected Arecont Vision to present its solution to Fremont Bank. A security demo was shown to the bank and the cameras were tested for three to four months. Fremont Bank eventually decided to select Arecont Vision as its solution provider.
The first phase involved upgrading the cameras to Arecont Vision's compact box camera. In the past, each teller window had one camera viewing it. With compact box cameras, one camera is able to view three and sometimes four teller windows. Multi-sensor cameras provide an overview of the general area and the single sensors are used for their wide dynamic range.
With compact box cameras, one camera is able to view three and sometimes four teller windows.
At some locations, the Multi-sensor cameras were able to perform facial recognition and the data was used to help the police capture the suspect. The MicroDome surface mount was used for ATMs by providing corridor views, which means the camera is able to gather information regardless of the height of the customer.
Monitoring the exterior of the administrative building was a mix of
SurroundVideo Panoramic 180 and Omni cameras with the additional of single sensors on critical doors. MicroDome and compact cameras can be seen inside of the building. 26 Fremont Bank locations in the Bay Area now has over 250 various styles of Arecont Vision cameras.
Bit Rate Control
When integrating IP surveillance, the user should understand how to optimize bit rates to capture the most essential images. Banks are particularly concerned with archive footage and reducing the space taken up by high bit rates. Bit rate is the size of the data that is output by the camera, it can vary based on the image being captured. Video compression, resolution and scene lighting contribute to the size of the bit rate. A live video feed will have even more bit rate variations and other factors such as lighting and activity.
Arecont Vision provides the option with its systems to control the bit rate based on the users' preference. Bit rate control is a method to maintain consistent bit rates for MPEG compression. This can improve bandwidth usage; however, it may reduce image quality. Variable bit rate (VBR) is an option to configure the quality of the image based on the activities being captured. If there is low activity, the system will apply compression to the video, which places a limit on the bit rate size. While during high activity, the system will allow the bit rate to increase therefore capturing higher quality video. This will allow for better storage management for archive footage.
Constant bit rate (CBR) is the opposite of VBR where the user sets a target bit rate and the camera will attempt to maintain and avoid increases in bit rates. It will apply compression even with high activity to stay below the target bit rate. This in turn may reduce the quality of the image but keep the level of bit rates low. The user must consider if they want low compression with high quality or high compression with lower quality images to transmit over the network.
Bandwidth Savings Mode is an option for users to maintain high quality images without the need for compression. It optimizes various image control settings to reduce the bit rates. The mode can reduce bit rates as much as fifty percent from default, but the tradeoff is the loss of some color fidelity and image sharpness.
A new product enhancement released by Arecont Vision to control bit rates is Smart Noise adaptation and Processing (SNAPstream) technology. It is an improvement of the codecs and optimized H.264 streaming. SNAPstream will also reduce the bandwidth without changing image quality.