Given the ever-growing number of cameras
It so happened that for three and a half years I worked in a small office engaged in the sale, installation and maintenance of security systems and video surveillance.
I would like to at least somehow share my experience in this topic, especially after reading such comments .
Of course, the degree of insanity in this type of panic statement
In any, and even IT, work, everything depends on the human factor, that is, at the end of the chain of finding out what the video surveillance system recorded, there is a security officer or Ministry of Internal Affairs and a specialist in charge of the video surveillance system. That is, there is a high probability that you can’t get the video quickly or immediately.
It is necessary:
Reaching the installation site is not always easy. There are complex business relationships at the facilities, and even when the recording equipment is right outside the door, they are unlikely to be opened even if there are crusts, since the owner of the equipment or the owner of the keys still needs to be found.
Agree with the responsible person quickly, as usually in small enterprises the video is stored for no longer than two weeks, and the archives are rewritten cyclically.
Making a video is also a problem. Basically, the problem is the understanding of this mechanism by ordinary people. It is only in the series that you can connect to the camera through half the country and watch the video in real time. This can only be done in very large companies at the level of mobile operators or banks. On most sites, video recorders are self-contained. And, although the new equipment has the ability to broadcast to the network, not every installer and integrator gives the equipment this opportunity.
The problem is that connecting security to a specific device to the internal network of the enterprise and dragging gigabytes of video traffic daily from each remote object through this network will not have enough hands or the thickness of the channel, especially considering that this channel can simply not to be, and the construction of infrastructure in some places is economically unprofitable. The maximum you can count on in this situation is the employee who will go and save everything you need manually.
The owners of small private offices and even large chain stores in the coffin saw someone providing network access to their registrars, and even connecting the registrars to the company's internal network. They keep video surveillance in order to control their employees and record internal minor incidents such as breaking windows or petty thefts. And even taking into account that the default passwords are practically none of the owners of these systems, it is often impossible to connect from the outside to the recording equipment due to the lack of physical access to it, or constant monitoring by employees of access to the equipment.
Sometimes at large facilities such as factories, security monitors real-time images from cameras, but this is more the exception than the rule. You need to understand that the CCTV operator needs to pay for what it is staring at the screen, and this can only be afforded by large enterprises. In the vast majority of cases, no one is watching the cameras in real time, because this is dog work.
In fact, videos are searched in the video archive by the date and time of the incident. Actual observation can be seen unless a flip over the fence,or a plane crashing onto a large pentagonal building.
It is difficult to determine a person’s identity on video from conventional video surveillance systems. If this person was not familiar to the security guard and security guard at first, did not become familiar with the object, then only special services can determine the identity from the video. I have not seen commercial portrait search systems.
In addition, in most cases it is impossible to get a good portrait from cameras. The typical resolution of most surveillance cameras does not exceed 700 TV lines, cameras are installed at a height of more than two and a half meters and cover large spaces. Almost no one puts telephoto lenses (with a small angle of coverage) on the doorway. Lenses and protective glasses of casings are often dirty, and this greatly affects the quality of the picture. It’s good if the cameras are cleaned once a year, more often they collect dust during the entire service life. Owners do not like spending money on system maintenance. In addition, video is rarely recorded at a frequency of 24 frames per second, usually 6 or less. Therefore, portraits on video are blurry.
Separately, I will talk about IP-video surveillance. Yes, this is the least protected system from unauthorized access, again, there is constant access to the network, default passwords, backdoors and jambs of firmware that allow you to access Linux on board the camera, all this is present. Yes, the picture quality from such cameras is much higher than from analog ones. Sometimes the quality is amazing. But the human factor plays a role here too: the disk space for video from IP cameras is needed many times more, which is not always taken into account. The cost of the cameras themselves is at least ten times more than that of analog ones. Contractors do not have enough qualified specialists to work with this equipment, and IT specialists at the facility fundamentally do not help contractors. Good road cameras, very expensive Our branded ones (aka Taiwanese / Chinese) suffer from childhood diseases - there is no pre-sale combat testing by manufacturers, from which cameras sometimes do not survive the warranty period. Optics (lenses) often do not match the resolution and quality of multi-megapixel matrices, which is why some models of IP cameras do not have much better picture quality than analog ones.
Examples:
From all this, I personally have a conclusion: with the existing system for integrating video surveillance (more precisely, the lack of this system), with a low culture of equipment maintenance, with low professionalism of the vast majority of people employed in this industry (here you need to be not just a security guard, not just an electronics engineer with optics, not just an IT specialist, and not even an office with such specialists, you need to be this all in one person, and still not be lazy to climb the poles to the cameras yourself), with laziness and a small number of operational workers and places
paranoia about instant identification by recording from surveillance cameras has the right to be only for those who work in buildings monitored in offices and corridors, for those who can be purposefully monitored, or for those who are engaged in something inappropriate under surveillance if anyone else knows about it.
I would like to at least somehow share my experience in this topic, especially after reading such comments .
Of course, the degree of insanity in this type of panic statement
Given the ever-growing number of cameras that shoot everything and everything, it’s the same as sending your own photos or photos of a car with numbers to special services.It seems to me elevated.
In any, and even IT, work, everything depends on the human factor, that is, at the end of the chain of finding out what the video surveillance system recorded, there is a security officer or Ministry of Internal Affairs and a specialist in charge of the video surveillance system. That is, there is a high probability that you can’t get the video quickly or immediately.
It is necessary:
- get to the place of installation of recording equipment,
- agree with the person in charge of the system to remove the video information,
- shoot a video
- identify the suspect.
Reaching the installation site is not always easy. There are complex business relationships at the facilities, and even when the recording equipment is right outside the door, they are unlikely to be opened even if there are crusts, since the owner of the equipment or the owner of the keys still needs to be found.
Agree with the responsible person quickly, as usually in small enterprises the video is stored for no longer than two weeks, and the archives are rewritten cyclically.
Making a video is also a problem. Basically, the problem is the understanding of this mechanism by ordinary people. It is only in the series that you can connect to the camera through half the country and watch the video in real time. This can only be done in very large companies at the level of mobile operators or banks. On most sites, video recorders are self-contained. And, although the new equipment has the ability to broadcast to the network, not every installer and integrator gives the equipment this opportunity.
The problem is that connecting security to a specific device to the internal network of the enterprise and dragging gigabytes of video traffic daily from each remote object through this network will not have enough hands or the thickness of the channel, especially considering that this channel can simply not to be, and the construction of infrastructure in some places is economically unprofitable. The maximum you can count on in this situation is the employee who will go and save everything you need manually.
The owners of small private offices and even large chain stores in the coffin saw someone providing network access to their registrars, and even connecting the registrars to the company's internal network. They keep video surveillance in order to control their employees and record internal minor incidents such as breaking windows or petty thefts. And even taking into account that the default passwords are practically none of the owners of these systems, it is often impossible to connect from the outside to the recording equipment due to the lack of physical access to it, or constant monitoring by employees of access to the equipment.
Sometimes at large facilities such as factories, security monitors real-time images from cameras, but this is more the exception than the rule. You need to understand that the CCTV operator needs to pay for what it is staring at the screen, and this can only be afforded by large enterprises. In the vast majority of cases, no one is watching the cameras in real time, because this is dog work.
In fact, videos are searched in the video archive by the date and time of the incident. Actual observation can be seen unless a flip over the fence,
It is difficult to determine a person’s identity on video from conventional video surveillance systems. If this person was not familiar to the security guard and security guard at first, did not become familiar with the object, then only special services can determine the identity from the video. I have not seen commercial portrait search systems.
In addition, in most cases it is impossible to get a good portrait from cameras. The typical resolution of most surveillance cameras does not exceed 700 TV lines, cameras are installed at a height of more than two and a half meters and cover large spaces. Almost no one puts telephoto lenses (with a small angle of coverage) on the doorway. Lenses and protective glasses of casings are often dirty, and this greatly affects the quality of the picture. It’s good if the cameras are cleaned once a year, more often they collect dust during the entire service life. Owners do not like spending money on system maintenance. In addition, video is rarely recorded at a frequency of 24 frames per second, usually 6 or less. Therefore, portraits on video are blurry.
Separately, I will talk about IP-video surveillance. Yes, this is the least protected system from unauthorized access, again, there is constant access to the network, default passwords, backdoors and jambs of firmware that allow you to access Linux on board the camera, all this is present. Yes, the picture quality from such cameras is much higher than from analog ones. Sometimes the quality is amazing. But the human factor plays a role here too: the disk space for video from IP cameras is needed many times more, which is not always taken into account. The cost of the cameras themselves is at least ten times more than that of analog ones. Contractors do not have enough qualified specialists to work with this equipment, and IT specialists at the facility fundamentally do not help contractors. Good road cameras, very expensive Our branded ones (aka Taiwanese / Chinese) suffer from childhood diseases - there is no pre-sale combat testing by manufacturers, from which cameras sometimes do not survive the warranty period. Optics (lenses) often do not match the resolution and quality of multi-megapixel matrices, which is why some models of IP cameras do not have much better picture quality than analog ones.
Examples:
- Installers of ATM skimmers - portraits turn out to be good, but only after customers complain to the Security Council of the host bank of the ATM, if the attacker did not guess to close the cameras or if the first complaints arrived before the registrar overwritten the archive.
- Thieves in a store, in a warehouse - a portrait will be, but not the fact that a good one. The employee will be recognized (it happens that they recognize by hairstyle, gait, habits), either the policemen or the security guards will recognize the stranger.
- Fighting on the street - only silhouettes of participants and witnesses will be visible.
- Car theft - car model (number not always), approximate time of the incident, approximate number of witnesses.
- Accident - date, time of an accident, model of cars of participants / witnesses.
- Throwing over the fence of the plant - if it is far from the camera, then only the time and place, although there are options associated with the fact that the plant can, in principle, track who was at what time.
- For IP cameras, everything is better. Indoors, they allow you to get detailed portraits with sufficient illumination of the face and good fps recording. Outdoor IP cameras in the afternoon can allow you to consider the number of the car, the face of the driver, pedestrians, if they hang correctly. At night without lighting, all their advantages disappear.
From all this, I personally have a conclusion: with the existing system for integrating video surveillance (more precisely, the lack of this system), with a low culture of equipment maintenance, with low professionalism of the vast majority of people employed in this industry (here you need to be not just a security guard, not just an electronics engineer with optics, not just an IT specialist, and not even an office with such specialists, you need to be this all in one person, and still not be lazy to climb the poles to the cameras yourself), with laziness and a small number of operational workers and places
paranoia about instant identification by recording from surveillance cameras has the right to be only for those who work in buildings monitored in offices and corridors, for those who can be purposefully monitored, or for those who are engaged in something inappropriate under surveillance if anyone else knows about it.