CCTVs from companies such as WatchNET, CP Plus and Ever Focus have emerged as a great boon for owners and managers of commercial establishments in and around UAE and Dubai. They have greatly improved the security of workplaces and help in monitoring assets and personnel in real time. While CCTV are commonly available in the Emirates of UAE, one needs to be careful about the kind of CCTV or feature that he or she selects for a particular place. Today we will share some handy tips to help take maximum advantage of your CCTV installation and setup –
- Type of monitoring – First of all make sure that you know the purpose of your surveillance. Different agencies or individuals will need CCTV support for different use. Below are the 4 key types of surveillance monitoring and the appropriate screen size the object needs to fill up –
- Monitoring crowds – In cases of high attendance functions, traffic, malls or parking lots, make sure the target size is not less than 5% of the entire screen size
- Detection – The target needs to occupy 10% of the total screen size to enable easy detection
- Recognition of a ‘known’ person – The target will occupy 50%
- Recognition of an ‘unknown’ person – The target will occupy 100% to be easily identifiable
- Type of camera – Before narrowing down on the type of camera needed for your CCTV installation, try and obtain answers to queries such as –
- Will it be used indoors or outdoors?
- What is the scope of area to be covered?
- Whether you need static (fixed) or PTZ cameras?
- What is the angle of view needed?
- What is the distance between the camera and the subject?
- What is the type of mounting required?
- Sensitivity of camera – The entire purpose of monitoring is to be able to use the images/feeds captured for future decision making. This will depend on the below factors –
- Prevalent light conditions – A range of 10 to 40 lux is usually sufficient to derive a usable color image
- Lens aperture – The camera’s sensor is responsible for the light on the image. An F1.0 will allow 20% of the light to enter the sensors while a F2.0 will allow only 5%
- Lens quality – An spherical lens will allow sharper image capture than a standard lens.
- Illumination levels – Some of the scenarios that offer the metric of lux (unit of luminosity measure) are as below -While a bright sunny day will denote as much as 50,000 lux, an indoor office will have an illumination level of 70-400. It goes as low as 5-60 in the low-lit parking lots to 0.001 lux in an overcast night with negligible illumination from the moon. The lux indication is the permissible lux levels at which the camera will output optimal image. This will help use the particular camera type suitable for a particular lux range.
Hope these insights will help you select the right kind of CCTV camera from leading manufacturers for your home, office or workplace – be it Samsung or DLink.
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