Although security surveillance camera capabilities have advanced spectacularly in the past decade, the quality of video in surveillance system deployments can still fall short of what is expected.
Q: We have a new security director, who is asking what the basis is for our video system design. Our integrator gave us some design quality guidelines from vendors, but we’re being asked for vendor-independent guidelines or standards. Are there some?
A: In addition to good reference materials, you need to revisit the overall design approach to make sure it accounts for all the security video stakeholders.
We now have 10-megapixel cameras on smartphones, TV commercials touting home video intercom doorbells, security video being used for business operations purposes, and law enforcement asking businesses to make outdoor video cameras accessible to them. Security video requirements have gone far beyond what they were for the first 50 years of security video. It’s no longer just a “best product selection” task.
An early stage in any system design is requirements development, which must be done in order to have a sound basis for the design. In the case of a security video system, that includes individual camera requirements, which themselves are derived from the video stakeholders’ requirements. Doing this right provides you with increased organization support, and sometimes opens the doors to new funding sources.
Initial Response
The basis for your security video system design should have two aspects:
1. Facility risk assessment
2. Business operations needs assessment
Right now, find out which cameras have more than acceptable video quality. What percentage of cameras is that? This lets you provide some initial information that puts you and any senior management stakeholders on the same page.
This would allow you to provide an appropriate first answer to the security director’s question. It could be something like this: “We’re now updating our video system design approach to make sure that it fully captures the business’s security and operational needs. We know that about 30% of our facility areas need a camera quality upgrade, and there may be some areas that haven’t received camera coverage that should have it. That assessment is going to take about 60 days, given our current workload. When we’re done, we’ll have a prioritized set of short term and long term camera deployment upgrades.”
Adjust the percentage and assessment time frames to fit your actual situation.
Stakeholder Feedback
Many organizations have specifically designated “area owners” for their facilities, but when they haven’t it’s easy enough to determine who is responsible for what goes on in each area of the facility. Stairwells and other areas can have several such stakeholders, such as the owners for areas the stairwell doors open into, facility maintenance, and cleaners.
You can and should perform a stakeholder video review either at a security video workstation or at the area owner’s desk or a meeting room using a laptop or a tablet. That has two steps to it, and if you omit the first step, you’ll compromise the results from the second step:
1. Good Examples. Show the stakeholder examples of good quality video for security purposes and for business operational purposes. Explain the mission or purpose of each camera’s coverage of its field of view. Include the rationale for where the camera is mounted to achieve that particular view. Show some close-up (zoomed-in) video images, so that the quality of the video image is apparent. If there are coverage deficiencies in some areas, you should also point those out along with why the coverage is needed. You can also save some camera images from best light and low light conditions, to show the range of conditions under which the camera must do its job.
2. Stakeholder’s Areas. Now show the stakeholder the views for the cameras in each of the stakeholder’s areas. If there are no cameras or aren’t enough cameras, walk the areas with the stakeholder and identify the parts of each area where adding video coverage would be helpful for security’s purposes or for the stakeholder’s objectives. Review the security risk scenarios for the area, getting feedback on any changes to the security risk picture or the operational risks of concern to the stakeholder. Be sure to get the stakeholder’s take on the importance of the video coverage for both security and business operations purposes and ask to be enlightened on the specifics of the business operations value points and be sure to write them down, so that your video improvement proposals can include those rationales. Also, discuss lighting if the existing lighting may be an issue.
If you haven’t done step one, then there will be no basis for the stakeholder to evaluate the video coverage in the stakeholder’s areas. By performing that first step, you’ll be enabling the stakeholder not only to provide you with feedback on video requirements but to explain or justify those requirements if questioned by a senior decision-maker. Otherwise, you may be unknowingly putting the stakeholder on the spot with higher-ups, and that won’t be appreciated but will be remembered.
If you have prepared yourself by reviewing the security risk scenarios the camera deployment is intended to address, you’ll likely come up with some additional security requirements of your own during the stakeholder reviews.
What Is Good Quality Video?
Good quality video is quality sufficient to fulfill the camera’s purpose. That typically depends not just on the quality of the camera, but on the camera’s location and the available lighting.
An example of two non-vendor references that relate video technical details to video quality are the 40-page Digital Video Quality Handbook (2013) and the 50-page Digital Video Quality Handbook Appendix (2018), produced by the Video Quality in Public Safety initiative (VQiPS) initiative of the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. I highly recommend those two references for anyone designing or maintaining security video surveillance systems.
Assessment Report
Create a camera deployment assessment report that includes the needed and desired improvements, prioritized according to security risk and business value, and referencing the video quality guidance you have applied. This will provide you with a sound basis for discussions with and proposals to security and business investment decision-makers, who typically end up with a good appreciation for the depth of the security and business analysis that was involved.
About the Author: Ray Bernard, PSP CHS-III, is the principal consultant for Ray Bernard Consulting Services (RBCS), a firm that provides security consulting services for public and private facilities (www.go-rbcs.com). In 2018 IFSEC Global listed Ray as #12 in the world’s Top 30 Security Thought Leaders. He is the author of the Elsevier book Security Technology Convergence Insights available on Amazon. Mr. Bernard is a Subject Matter Expert Faculty of the Security Executive Council (SEC) and an active member of the ASIS International member councils for Physical Security and IT Security. Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayBernardRBCS.
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