Professional design of CCTV systems
During the design of CCTV systems much time is spent on estimating lens focal length and the right location of video cameras to get the necessary image on the screen.
Not only lens focal length but also the height of the camera installation, maximum distance, Network infrastructure, cabling root and EMT/PVC conduit plan along with the storage calculation that has a big impact on the system and cost of the project.
The following 7 steps will explain the design stages for each customised CCTV surveillance system.
1. The Site Walk/ Site survey
The site walk is the most important practice that professional system integrators and installers follow. Our Security engineer gather all the customer or stakeholder requirements which are essential for an accurate system design.
2. Setting the Scale
Our second professional practice is critical for determining the area of coverage and the capabilities of any given security camera and camera location.
The scale will help us determine the distance, resolution and other needs to support the customer’s desired application need from person recognition to new analytics applications.
3. Applying the right camera and associated technologies
- Fixed Network Camera: fixed, varifocal or zoom lens; boxed or bullet type.
- Fixed Dome Camera: fixed, varifocal or zoom lens; compact and dome casing.
- PTZ Dome Camera: pan, tilt & zoom functions; wider coverage and superior zoom.
- Thermal Camera: creates images based on heat radiating from an object, vehicle, or person.
- 360 Degree / Panoramic / Fisheye/ AiCamera: wide area in a single view, ideal for retail applications.
- HD & Megapixel Camera: 4K Ultra HD, superior video image resolution.
- Licences Plate Recognition Camera: advanced traffic sensors used to capture and digitalize images from license plates.
4. Extended network transmission &Plan Cable root
Image transmission is vital when designing a network-based IP security system. Wide range of transmission solutions that can be deployed such as ethernet switches, encoders/decoders, fibre and wireless.
Three main types of wireless networks are point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and mesh.
Drawbacks of wireless solutions are:
5. Network design, bandwidth, and security consideration
For IP systems, the video data travels across a network-based infrastructure. In many cases it will be a dedicated LAN. It is increasingly common for AMC to work in co-ordination with the customer IT department so that the security system transitions work smoothly on the network.
Selecting the right security options such as, firewalls, virtual private networks, and password protection, will eliminate concerns about how an IP CCTV system might be compromised.
6. Storage calculations and servers
Storage requirements, accessibility and retrieval of images and related information including scalability, redundancy, and performance, are all important to a network solution.
We apply two ways to design storage solutions:
- Storage attached to the server running the application, as in a Network Video Recorder (NVR).
- The other solution is where the storage is separate from the server running the application, called network attached storage (NAS).
7. Streamlining budget estimation & automating the Bill of Materials
Last, streamlining the budget and the Bill of Materials.
Once approved by the customer, we sign the contract and provide a timeline for starting the project.
