Four Ways to Upgrade Security Cameras Without Replacing Them

Want to get more out of your security cameras, but aren’t ready to invest an expensive rip-and-replace? Luckily, there are many new ways to upgrade your video surveillance system using hardware you probably already have. Here are four popular options:

1. AI Detection

Several years ago, integrating Artificial Intelligence capabilities into a video system was not a small undertaking. For all but the simplest use cases, it would have required a budget of several hundred thousand dollars for forward-deployed engineers, custom modeling, and building training corpuses.

Now, many of these AI uses cases can be accessed for a few thousand – or in some cases, a few hundred – dollars a year. AI-enabled VMS platforms like Brivo Eagle Eye’s EEVA or custom appliances like Spot.ai bring years of research to end users at prices that seem incredibly low by even recent comparison.

For warehouse and industrial operators, that makes it much easier to solve security and safety problems that video can address. Intelligent zone detection can detect forklifts in ped zones. Aisle and yard cameras can detect missing PPE. Dangerous and erratic behaviors can be filtered out from normal patterns.

2. Video Alarm Verification

Commercial intrusion alarms are important parts of keeping a business safe, but municipal false alarm fees for birds, blowing packaging, misplaced inventory, or user error can turn into a significant budget line item. Large operations have always had SOCs (security operations centers) to filter out false alarms, but these specialized facilities are rare in small- and medium-sized operations.

Web cameras level the false alarm playing field. By allowing a video feed to be viewed by the central alarm monitoring station, even smaller operators get the benefit of human eyes on an alarm condition before that alarm is passed on for a potentially-expensive law enforcement response. In cases where there is a true security incident, law enforcement prioritizes and responds up to 75% faster to verified alarms.

As an added benefit, you’ll be contributing to good corporate citizenship. False alarms are a major drain on police resources in many places. In fact, some municipalities are now requiring video verification as a condition of response. Although these regulations are limited now, if they work well, expect to see them increase.

3. Object Counting

Turn your cameras from a cost center into a profitability driver for your business. Use your cameras to count customers, trucks, pallets, pick trips, travel time or other important operational data that is otherwise difficult to capture and quantify.

Use a variety of data export tools and APIs to turn things the cameras see into quantifiable, analyzable, reportable data to find hidden opportunities for cost savings, sales, and risk reduction.

4. Cloud VMS

Managing server infrastructure can be time-consuming and expensive. This is especially true in large, complex video surveillance installations like those found in mid- and large-sized warehouses. Replacement cycles, drive failures, adjusting retention settings, ensuring cybersecurity compliance, and making site visits to pull incident video can all drive up the cost and frustration of managing video infrastructure.

By moving cameras off of on-site servers and hard drives and uploading video to a secure cloud partner, IT and Operations teams can get predictable budgets and zero time swapping drives and messing with retention settings. For multi-site operators, being able to access all video from a single UI eliminates travel time to get incident video. As a bonus, smart search tools make it easier to find the video you need, when you need it.

CAVEATS

Of course, not every camera can be used for every use case. Analog cameras need to be encoded to digitized to make use of most of these features. Even then, they may lack the resolution necessary to function fully.

Most modern IP cameras will work well with these upgrades, but there are still edge cases where resolution, lighting, or angle will interfere with the solution.

If you have cameras you’d like to consider upgrading and aren’t sure if they are the right thing, please contact us for a free Needs Assessment. We’ll discuss your current equipment and what you are hoping to do with it.