Digital eyes and ears

Leveraging your existing network to act as a security system is certainly cost-beneficial, from both the hardware and staffing perspective. But it’s also a way to beef up security. IP video-surveillance systems offer features far more advanced than what you can get from standard analog CCTV (closed circuit TV). It’s no wonder these systems are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise.

We recently put two IP surveillance management systems to the test: Axis Communications’ ACS (Axis Camera Station) is a functional yet low-cost camera management system, whereas On-Net Surveillance Systems’ NetDVR-64 clearly represents the high end of this market, boasting an amazing set of features and a price to match. Our tests brought to light several important factors for you toconsider when choosing and implementing a surveillance management system.

First, you will need high-performance hardware. Although fairly heavily muscled, the test machines we used in this review were often put under severe disk and CPU strain when performing advanced functions such as date-and-time-based searching.

Second, you will need plenty of storage. Even when we only recorded events at a rate of just 10 frames per second (a low frame rate that still provides image quality high enough for facial recognition even at a dead run), we stored more than 1.5GB of data per camera per day. Multiply that by 100 cameras, and the storage requirements for recording 24/7 would quickly eat you out of house and home. Configuring cameras to transmit live images at a constant rate while recording only a small number of images can save lots of disk space.

A third thing to keep in mind is the security of the camera itself. Password protection is important, but so is defending these appliances against network threats. Wireless cameras are especially vulnerable to DoS attacks, and relatively few camera manufacturers have taken this into account.

Axis Camera Station

Axis Communications sent us its ACS 1.0 software package and two cameras, the tiny but powerful Axis 205 and the full-featured Axis 210. ACS is designed to run as many as 25 Axis cameras from a single management or surveillance console.

We installed ACS on a Hewlett-Packard workstation equipped with a 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU, 512MB of RAM, and a video subsystem centered on 128MB of dedicated video memory. The system was running Windows XP with .Net installed, as ACS requires. Your initial ACS license will cover 10 cameras, but additional cameras can be added in single- or five-camera increments.

ACS is capable of scanning any single range of IP addresses or a full subnet in search of cameras to manage. In our case, we had it scan three different class-C subnets. ACS first uses a simple ping to find IP addresses that are active and then performs a more intensive scan for video cameras culled from that subset. This works fine, but to keep it working, you can’t have ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) ping filters between you and your cameras. The upside is that you don’t need static IP addresses on your cameras, just on the ACS console.

One of the things we liked about ACS is that it doesn’t require cameras to support motion detection. All you need is an active camera, and ACS will allow you to set desired motion-detection areas using on-screen squares; you simply place them over those portions of the image where you want to detect movement. You can also detect motion using IR (infrared) sensors placed around the room, allowing the camera to follow someone walking through the room by keying on each IR device.

ACS’ playback feature is also nicely equipped. The user interface is identical to the monitor view and is capable of doing video playback on multiple cameras simultaneously after a short disk-access delay. Although our HP workstation is fast, we might have improved performance by installing faster disk drives.

Video is searchable by date and time and can be accessed on a single- or multiple-camera basis. In multiple-camera mode, a search will automatically sync all the camera views to the specified date and time — very handy in forensic investigation. A word of caution: Each camera maintains its own time clock for this purpose, so having an accurate NTP (Network Time Protocol) server available on the LAN is a must for accurate searching.

If we have a complaint about ACS, it would have to be performance. The HP workstation we were using is well beyond Axis’ suggested configuration, yet when we asked for a particular camera’s view, ACS would sometimes take as long as several minutes before the new window would appear on the screen. More importantly, video searching is extremely CPU-intensive, and it sucked up nearly 100 percent of our CPU capacity despite the fact that we were running a CPU twice as fast as the one recommended by Axis.

Although we expected compatibility issues, it was nevertheless disappointing to learn that ACS will only work with Axis’ cameras — and then only those that run firmware Release 2.34 or later. Being able to drop ACS onto an existing cadre of IP cameras would have been great, but if you’re designing an IP surveillance system from the ground up, this limitation doesn’t mean much.

On-Net’s NetDVR-64

NetDVR competes at the high end of the camera management market. Its advantages over ACS start with hardware independence. NetDVR supports several IP camera platforms as well as analog CCTV cameras, a feature that will clearly ease the migration burden from an older security system.

NetDVR also supports a multiple-display monitor system on

the installed console, although we feel sure we could make ACS support this feature as well. NetDVR provides as many as 64 recording channels per console, whereas ACS tops out at 25. NetDVR also has ACS beat hands down for ease of searching and basic organization.

Whereas ACS provides simply a list of cameras with user-defined names of their locations, NetDVR can be integrated with a floor map of your building, allowing users to click through each floor and select individual cameras on a point-and-click basis. From here, users can search through an individual camera’s log for past events or saved video. Even sweeter, the alarm system can bring up events in a hierarchical structure of a NetDVR installation, allowing a single security officer to monitor multiple sites from a single console.

Searching with NetDVR was noticeably faster than with ACS, probably because NetDVR places all recorded video into a database. This allows not only for faster date-and-time searches but also for NetDVR’s search feature to be integrated with other applications, such as a point-of-sale system. This would allow you to sync image searches with specific cash register transactions or click on a particular transaction and find the appropriate video slice.

Other add-ons include the ability to integrate in the iPix video enhancement software, which allows you to store a 360-degree view from a single camera — handy for both surveillance and Web presentations.

NetDVR is an expansive product that cannot be done full justice in this small space. The company has put much thought and effort into making this system a viable replacement for traditional analog video-surveillance systems without forcing a forklift upgrade to IP-based cameras all at once. Because this system integrates so well with various types of video systems — through the use of either Axis or Sony camera servers — it allows you to move gradually from analog video cameras to high-resolution IP cameras. Given its feature set and broad compatibility base, NetDVR may be most folks’ best choice, unless you’re opting for an all-Axis solution right off the bat.

ACS’ software has an advantage over NetDVR in that it can scan a specified subnet for cameras, thus handling DHCP better than NetDVR does. But because this capability is limited to Axis cameras, the advantage is not a big one. Furthermore, ACS is based on ActiveX and thus suffers from bloated DLL-swapping syndrome, resulting in window changes and button clicks that feel slow even on respectable hardware. Running on the same machine and using the same cameras, NetDVR was snappy by comparison.

Finally, although ACS is the clear winner on price at $99 per camera, which is about one-third the cost of NetDVR, ACS provides limited scalability. NetDVR supports much larger installations, and because it can handle most (but not all) popular high-end

IP cameras, it gives customers more flexibility in designing their IP surveillance systems.