Low budget small town community-based CCTV system

[roknjohn 0]

Our local crime watch community group is exploring some ideas about bringing CCTV to our small community. Full scale commercial systems are cost prohibitive. The idea that interests us is a community-based system, where homeowners and businesses would purchase a single camera and allow our local police department some type of central access. Considering that most people have broadband internet, it may be a low-cost alternative. Here are some thoughts that we have discussed.

 

Businesses and homeowners could purchase a low cost camera mounted on their property used to monitor a nearby street or sidewalk. The camera would be accessible from a central location over the Internet. Networking would be achieved using the existing broadband services of at each camera location. The system should be designed to minimize bandwidth requirement at each camera site. Perhaps, each camera could have some on-board storage or a 1-2 channel DVR so that law enforcement could query video archives on demand whenever an event had occurred. 24 hr live video or snapshots would also be useful, if bandwidth (especially during business hours) is minimized. The main purpose of the system is to help investigators identify criminals/vehicles that were in the vicinity around the time of a crime.

 

For example, this past weekend a quiet little neighborhood was awakened to gunshots at 3:30am. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Several homeowners in the area had CCTV systems had were able to get glimpses of the vehicle that was responsible, but identification is going to be difficult. Our thinking is that is we had 20 or so networked cameras located around our small town, an investigator could easily reconstruct the vehicle's movement through town with possibly more easily identifiable images.

 

The city is willing to buy a PC-based central monitoring system and additional bandwidth to have some sort of real-time monitoring (it could be something like 4-8 frames per minute per camera) unless a specific camera was selected (for a limited time) for faster video. Again, the main purpose would be to search archived video stored at each camera site for a specific time interval or motion event when necessary. Therefore, we'd like the cameras to have about a week of motion-detected DVR capability.

 

To attract more volunteers and participates in the program, it would be nice if the individual systems were expandable with more cameras and normal CCTV features, but not shared with the community network. In other words, a homeowner could buy a 4 camera system, and elect to give access to only one of those cameras to the city.

 

Having said all of that, I'm asking this group for any information on similar setups around the country, and pointers to additional information, hardware specs, etc., so that we can put together a proof of concept to pitch to the city council.

[Twilo123 0]

on the city side you will want a software/computer system like an nvr. you could look at milestone, zoneminder (open source and free), onssi, exacq, ipconfigure, genetec, etc.

 

on the business/homeowner side you would need cctv hardware that your chosen nvr software supports. this could be ip cameras or analog cameras to dvr (the nvr software would get the video from dvr in that case). for bandwidth tweaking most ip cameras have extensive options you can tweak when pulling remote streams. for dvr they typically have less options to tweak on remote streams to 3rd party software.

 

for onboard storage most mainstream decent ip cameras support sdcards and any dvr has local storage via hard drives. some product supports streaming storage option to record to nas. you could also use ftp snapshots based on timers, motion, analytics, etc.

 

in response to this part:

"it would be nice if the individual systems were expandable with more cameras and normal CCTV features, but not shared with the community network. In other words, a homeowner could buy a 4 camera system, and elect to give access to only one of those cameras to the city."

 

from what i read initially this is not a 'community network' but each persons personal network. all they are doing is sharing a camera or two. in the case of ip cameras each is setup independently so you just give the ip/port and user/pass to the cameras you want them to access and they will only have access to those. for the case of dvr some have options for a particular user to only see certain cameras at certain day/time/schedule, etc. so it can be done that way also.

 

they key to this whole thing is really the nvr. get a good nvr that supports a wide range of cctv hardware and then the business/homeowner can choose ones they are comfortable with (price, placement, type of camera ptz, IR, low light, indoor vs outdoor, etc.). the business/homeowner controls the cctv hardware on their property so they can add it to the 'community network' or remove it whenever they want. they can also add more cctv hardware which is not accessible to the 'community network' but is still fully accessible by themselves both locally and remotely.

 

what you are asking for is pretty easy to do IMO. the issues that arise may be more legal/personal/process orientated more than technical. for instance if a business/homeowner goes over their bandwidth allotment for the month and get charged extra who is responsible for that charge since the data is being used for the camera and their personal use. if something happens on video that the business/homeowner shouldn't have been doing are they legally liable, etc.

[WilsonJ 0]

Twilo did a good job addressing the technical issues. If you are looking for NVR systems for home owners or small business, Qnap is actually has pretty good affordable/budget NVR systems. Just my 2 cents.

[rory 0]

Something like the Dahua DVRs would do most of what you want for cheap ..

They can get the basic 4 channel DVRs (or larger DVRs) then just setup one user for 1 camera for remote access. Then they can use any [non IP] CCTV camera.

 

They can use the manufacturer software called PSS or DSS for 50-1000 DVRs (really dont want that much per monitoring PC though) and up to 121 way multiview - plus multiple monitor and or alarm center feature. PSS is not really considered Enterprise though and the Search recorded video is rather basic compared to most PC DVRs, but it does work and can backup video to AVI that can be played using any generic H264 codecs.

 

There is also NVR software from a company called Linovision that sees the Dahua DVR channels as individual IP cameras and can do offsite recording and much better search etc. cost is low compared to other NVR software, not sure how good it is though as I only tried the demo version which was limited, but still interesting.

 

DSS would give an admin control and can monitor the DVRs also. Setup is done through a web browser on a remote server PC and the admin can add DVRs and channels and also users, users then can use the client and login and access only the cameras assigned to them. DSS has other features like alerts and logs etc.

 

Not sure if this is what you are looking for though, just putting it out there as an option.

No its not Exact or Qnap but you did say low budget.

Edited November 4, 2011 by Guest

[roknjohn 0]

Thank you all for your responses. You have been most helpful. I think I'm at the point now where I'd like to purchase an IP camera for testing for proof of concept along with some free or trial central software. It appears that IP cameras would be the easiest to install and configure, especially for those who already have a wi-fi network in place. Based on my current home DVR system, I think I want a camera with these specifications:

 

802.11 Wireless IP Camera

30m IR

4-7mm lens (fixed or vari)

On board storage

 

Can you recommend a good unit to evaluate? My guess is that I'll need one that is compatible with whatever central software we end up with.

 

How does the on-camera storage work for IP cameras? Can you (remotely) configure the recording parameters? Do cameras have onboard motion detection? Can you have live viewing at one frame rate and on-camera recording at another? Can the NVR or central software search the recorded video for motion events, or playback recording remotely? For NAT installations, how does one handle dynamic addressing. Or, can the camera just "call" the server?

 

Last question (for this post anyway), do any of these camera or NVR vendors have any open API? I am a software engineer and may be willing to develop features that aren't available off the shelf.

 

Thanks again for your willingness to help.

[thewireguys 3]

I think this will be a administrators nightmare. Is everyone going to be required to have a static IP and minimum upload speeds? What happens if/when customers change ISPs? Do you have bandwidth caps from your ISPs?

 

I think your best option is to look at a VSaaS solution like Axis http://www.axis.com/products/avhs/index.htm

[roknjohn 0]

It may very well be a challenge to set up as I doubt most folks will have static IP addresses. Ideally, a camera initiated connection would solve this issue, but I don't know if this is a feature that is common among camera vendors. Without static IPs, some sort of dynamic DNS would be necessary. If the site has a computer running most of the time, the IP can be updated via something like no-ip.com or perhaps this has already been addressed in the industry.

 

If homeowners and/or local businesses would like to participate, the city would like to recommend specific hardware and vendors (or perhaps we will just team up with local security installers) along with installation services, which would include all network, router, firewall configuration, etc.

 

As for bandwidth, I was hoping that the camera could be streaming a live view at a low frame rate around 100Kbs while simultaneously recording to on-camera storage at a higher frame rate. Only when an event has occurred, i.e. something was stolen, etc, would investigators pull the recorded video from the camera after searching for a particular time period. During these playbacks, the bandwidth requirement would be much higher. All participants would be made aware of this and protocol may even require their permission for each query.

 

The idea here is to conserve bandwidth at "idle" an only retrieve high quality video when necessary. In normal operations, central recording wouldn't even be mission critical. Basically a live frame or two per second would be sufficient, until an incident occurred. We are attempting to gradually build a system that is mostly funded by concerned citizens who would like to "do their part", rather than spend a lot of money (at a time when we don't have much) on a system. We want this to be a "volunteer" network of cameras that leverages existing residential wifi.

 

Any specific suggestions on cameras that would work well for this project?

[thewireguys 3]

I think your best option is to look at a VSaaS solution like Axis http://www.axis.com/products/avhs/index.htm

[tomcctv 187]

to be honest this is a bad idea your service team alone is going to have to be massive to the point your service team wage bill is going to cost much more than what you can generate from your customers. in a small town you are going to have cameras going down every day.

 

running an off site recording for IP cameras has always had problems and it will give you more problems if you cant give your customers the service.

 

 

you do need recording at each site (not from a SD card in a camera) you can Guarantee it will of over write by the time you get to it if the internet has gone down or ip has changed.

 

but at least if each site has NVR or dvr recording you have not let your customers down.

 

which is the service you intend to set up, a central monitoring station for a small town

[roknjohn 0]

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I'm not proposing this as a way to make money. I'm proposing this as an alternative to my town of about 8,000 over what would otherwise be cost prohibitive for us. We expect perhaps a dozen cameras initially. I'm sure we all would be very pleased if that number eventually grew to 25-30, with maybe a license plate camera or two in the mix.

 

If SD storage is not an option, do they make a small DVR that can "emulate" an IP camera?

[SEANHAWG 1]

Yeah you could do it.

 

Just like Rory started. If you are looking for low cost analog systems, then you could have each house have a 4 channel DVR. There isnt many 1-2 channel DVR's out on the market that are worth are darn and the ones that are any good cost more than a budget 4 channel. As long as each house has internet service, any of those 4 cameras would be accessible from the web. As long as you use the same brand DVR's, you could use the included DVR's CMS (Central Management Software) to have law enforcement to log into each DVR from one centralized computer in which they could see all (or most) of the cameras from every DVR at one time. Tom is right, you need local recording at each DVR, off site recording for that many DVR's would be horrendous. Also, if you wanted, you can also install the same software on any other computer as well. So if the homeowners wanted to view what was going on in their town, they would need to install the CMS software on their computer as well and input all of the IP information from each DVR as well.

 

You could do it, yes. Having several homeowners agree to do this is another thing. IP cameras are probably better for this scenario, but if you are on a strict budget than you could do what was just mentioned.

[rory 0]

and you maybe could watch 121 cameras in one view