[PLUG] Security camera's for linux

Paul Johnson baloo at ursine.ca
Mon Dec 8 20:35:02 UTC 2003


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:31:15AM -0800, Daggett, Steve wrote:
>   I disagree.  It sounds like someone was using crap cameras or too much
> video compression.

No.  It doesn't matter.  Once you hit the limits of the resolution,
that's it.  That's all the better you get.  If you're trying to
identify, say, a tattoo on someone's arm at a weird angle from the
footage, or try to read a license number off a plate someone has
(illegally) put a plastic cover or sprayed some glaring substance
over, an area of 120 pixels is going to be the same 120 pixels no
matter how big you blow it up.

It's not like with analog picture where you can go digitize the video
when you need to, at whatever resolution you need to, and then go nuts
tweaking it until you can make out what you need to.  And if you need
more resolution, just go re-encode from the original.

> Digital cameras have gotten a lot better and come down in price.
> Storage is cheep.  There's no reason that a digital surveillance
> system shouldn't be at least as good as an old analog system.

And yet, you're still limited by the resolution of the camera.  Which
means anybody standing across the room from the camera, when you go to
magnify the image, is going to look like they're on COPS: A blurry,
pixelated picture.

>   It's not just for video.  Some of the V4L projects do motion detection
> with still cameras.  

That's probably your most practical use for digital cameras.
Especially if where you're putting these up is a shop that has them
already for video telephony, just keep enough of the machines always
on to get motion sensor coverage where you want it.

- -- 
 .''`.     Paul Johnson <baloo at ursine.ca>
: :'  :    
`. `'`     proud Debian admin and user
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/1VDEUzgNqloQMwcRAmnOAJ9dQcpNXSIYHtFLaclCAUxzEdQPZwCfTBMV
WAbKcZqxAxrRLZ6a/NIWXbg=
=rusA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




More information about the PLUG mailing list