How Valuable Are Alarm System Cameras For Monitoring & Management?
How valuable are alarm system cameras – We’d argue cameras and alarm systems are meant for each other when it comes to site and system management and alarm/event monitoring.
It’s possible to get profound situational awareness from an alarm system that’s carefully installed with a range of sensor types creating overlapping zones that allow detection of breach of outer perimeter, breach of inner perimeter and movement through a breached premises.
Something that’s great about alarm sensors – be they intrusion, smoke, flood, vibration, etc – is that they never look away from a scene, never get bored, never get tired. They will remain alert to breach of their narrow, programmed thresholds as long as they have power.
Sensors, especially long-range intrusion sensors, vibration sensors and reeds, don’t need light. They are happier when conditions are gloomy and cold, and you’re never going to be peering into a scene trying to make out if there’s a person moving just outside a camera’s range.
In a world of $99 dollar cameras, this observation applies more strongly – there will be conditions in which a low cost camera cannot give adequate support – this includes cheap cameras with IVA, which won’t be as effective in low light.
However, cameras with useful IVA rules, such as detection of humans and detection of vehicles across an angle of view or as a line crossing rule, can offer excellent detection capability in good light, as well as video verification via a clip generated by an alarm rule.
If there’s a repeated alarm on 1 sensor at a site, it can be difficult to establish beyond doubt that you’re dealing with a false alarm or an intrusion. You’re relying on multiple sensors to be activated in a way that would be highly unlikely to occur without actual intrusion.
But if the sensor includes an integrated camera that captures a clip or series of stills images on activation, or if there’s an adjacent CCTV camera viewing the wider scene, it’s very easy to establish what caused an alarm event and to react. Some modern cameras also incorporate 2-way audio and flashing lights that may prove a deterrent in some instances.
Cameras also give a one-glance appraisal of ambient conditions – ambient weather, bushfire smoke, flood water, the presence of unexpected vehicles and more.
An alarm system that has areas of vulnerability – no perimeters, shallow perimeters – would also benefit from external camera coverage that pushes out from the building fabric and can provide an earlier warning of loitering or early attempts to defeat external doors.
Cameras can give an excellent overview, as well as a very close look at an area of high security or high risk. And given false alarms are inevitable, they also allow security managers and monitoring stations to put eyes onto an alarm event in a way sensor-only systems can never do.
Another camera option is Wi-Fi cameras with direct integration to the alarm system app – these include offerings like the Alarm.com cameras integrated into the Qolsys range of alarm panels.
What these cameras lack a little in image quality, they make up for in ease of integration and usability from the point of view of the end user and monitoring station. The latest generation of cameras from Alarm.com is a significant step up.
Being integrated into the app along with sensors, it’s very easy to take advantage of the situational awareness provided – the video intercom camera’s IVA rules also prove a useful adjunct to the security system by taking snaps of movement.
Sensors with integrated cameras are not the same as CCTV cameras with an accessible live stream, but they do deliver very useful imagery of alarm events to site managers and monitoring stations.
Is it worth installing nothing but sensor cameras across a site? In our opinion, no, but they should form a considerable percentage of your sensor group, internally and externally. Even having a single camera inside and outside is highly beneficial from the point of view of understanding unfolding intrusion events in real time.
For more info on the AJAX range or the AJAX MotionCam pictured, contact AJAX national distributor SecuSafe here – you can learn more about Qolsys and Alarm.com from your BGW Technologies team here – there’s more SEN news here.
“How Valuable Are Alarm System Cameras For Monitoring & Management?”
