The security industry in New Zealand has slowly progressed from using verification methods such as voice calls, through techniques such as sequential events from two or more detectors, to Video Verification over IP.
It has been widely proven that due to the additional information made available to operators, false alarms can be reduced where video verification technology is used to visually identify the source of alarm events.
The most basic form of Video Verification is where captured video is associated with an alarm event and is presented to monitoring facility personnel. This is usually in the form of a sequence of still snapshot images in Jpeg format or short a video clip and it will depend on the features available within the IP camera or network video server.
As a follow up to Captured Video, it is generally acceptable for monitoring facility personnel to use a live video connection to remotely view the premises and observe post alarm activity for a limited period of time. The ability for monitoring operators to do this and the amount of time that live video is available should be at the discretion of the subscriber as respect for their privacy is paramount.
A minimum of 5 still snapshot images should be taken with a maximum of one second between each frame. Recording should begin within one hundred milliseconds of the actual alarm event so that valuable information is not lost. This can be accomplished locally either by a hard wired connection from an alarm panel to an IP camera or IP video server, or remotely via software commands from a monitoring server upon the receipt of an event from an alarm panel and suitable IP alarm communicator.
When used in combination with cross zoning, listen-in audio or phone calls to the premises, video verification is a powerful tool for the prevention of false alarms. Video can be reviewed by the monitoring facility personnel prior to making notification calls to the relevant authorities and can include detailed information gathered to indicate if an emergency exists.
Video should be easily accessible to a trained monitoring operator and should be of a quality such that they will be able to decipher between a human and non-human. It is recommended that any captured video should include the area covered by the sensor that triggered the alarm event. If the sensor is a movement sensor, then the camera field of view should attempt to include as much of the movement sensors coverage area as possible.
The Virtual Monitoring Platform is a managed service made available to Monitoring Centers that want a video verification solution where subscribers have full control over how their cameras are recorded and accessed. The Verified Response component is a software application that is part of the IP Suite of software components provided to Monitoring Companies who prefer to have the video verification totally contained within their own infrastructure.