Challenges and Trends
Dome installation involves the physical labor of installers, who will usually scale great heights to place them. Reducing installation time is helpful, with more ergonomic designs or domes that come completely assembled out of the box.
Another trend is greater integration capabilities. “My advice to manufacturers has got to be ease of installation and integration,” Pigram said. “For installers and end users, it's all well and good to put in IP, but how to expand is the question.” Compatibility between IP devices can cause problems for future upgrades, which could get expensive as systems grow.
Interoperability standards such as ONVIF and PSIA promise to streamline the integration of domes with third-party VMS and storage. “The cost of basic network technology is still quite high compared to analog,” Pigram said. “You can't plug and play in the same way. ONVIF is emerging as the standard of choice in Europe, although ONVIF versions 1.01 and 1.02 are not backward compatible, which is somewhat confusing.”
Technical Issues
Domes offer installation advantages, but bubbles limit lens size. “The better the lens, the bigger it is,” Yang said. “But a dome cannot be huge. So in a limited space, you need to deliver a greater field of view.”
Pan and tilt controls for very high zoom lenses require great precision. The more the device moves, the harder it is to get the positioning on the motors accurate enough to match that high of a zoom, Stanfield said. “The smallest movement on a pan-tilt camera zoomed out far enough could move 20 to 30 feet, so it's hard to keep things in view.”
Market demand is growing for smaller PTZ domes. With more components fitting snugly together, another challenge is developing cameras for extremely high operating temperatures, Fr?nnlid said.
Bubble materials will face higher scrutiny, as plastic's insufficient clarity affects how light passes through. “The bubble in a traditional dome is actually another lens,” Stanfield said. “As the industry movestore solutions above 1.3-megapixel, manufacturers of PTZ domes have to start looking at bubbleless designs. Bubble clarity is not nearly as important for fixed domes as for movable domes because they only look through a small area of the bubble. But when you zoom in and out, or pan and tilt, the relationship of the lens to the bubble changes. It's then that the higher resolution reveals the imperfections of the plastic.”
Here to Stay Domes provide an unimpeded view, with increased adoption in traffic monitoring. Speed domes in particular will see strong uptake, Huang said.
Smarter analytics and resolution increases will yield more accurate video analytics for domes. “These advances will allow us to move reliable analytic use from perimeter protection to crowded scenes in the next five years,” Crosby said.
Domes have enjoyed steady usage for surveillance. As technical improvements have overcome positioning and mount problems, quality domes can perform reliably. However, site-specific concerns should be factored into product selection, with IP infrastructure affecting network dome performance. Understanding how dome parts work together and how to prevent failure will go a long way toward smooth dome performance.