Low budget small town community-based CCTV system

Low budget small town community-based CCTV system: "Our local crime watch community group is exploring some ideas about bringing CCTV to our small community. Full scale commercial systems are cost prohibitive. The idea that interests us is a community-based system, where homeowners and businesses would purchase a single camera and allow our local police department some type of central access. Considering that most people have broadband internet, it may be a low-cost alternative. Here are some thoughts that we have discussed.

Businesses and homeowners could purchase a low cost camera mounted on their property used to monitor a nearby street or sidewalk. The camera would be accessible from a central location over the Internet. Networking would be achieved using the existing broadband services of at each camera location. The system should be designed to minimize bandwidth requirement at each camera site. Perhaps, each camera could have some on-board storage or a 1-2 channel DVR so that law enforcement could query video archives on demand whenever an event had occurred. 24 hr live video or snapshots would also be useful, if bandwidth (especially during business hours) is minimized. The main purpose of the system is to help investigators identify criminals/vehicles that were in the vicinity around the time of a crime.

For example, this past weekend a quiet little neighborhood was awakened to gunshots at 3:30am. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Several homeowners in the area had CCTV systems had were able to get glimpses of the vehicle that was responsible, but identification is going to be difficult. Our thinking is that is we had 20 or so networked cameras located around our small town, an investigator could easily reconstruct the vehicle's movement through town with possibly more easily identifiable images.

The city is willing to buy a PC-based central monitoring system and additional bandwidth to have some sort of real-time monitoring (it could be something like 4-8 frames per minute per camera) unless a specific camera was selected (for a limited time) for faster video. Again, the main purpose would be to search archived video stored at each camera site for a specific time interval or motion event when necessary. Therefore, we'd like the cameras to have about a week of motion-detected DVR capability.

To attract more volunteers and participates in the program, it would be nice if the individual systems were expandable with more cameras and normal CCTV features, but not shared with the community network. In other words, a homeowner could buy a 4 camera system, and elect to give access to only one of those cameras to the city.

Having said all of that, I'm asking this group for any information on similar setups around the country, and pointers to additional information, hardware specs, etc., so that we can put together a proof of concept to pitch to the city council.

Statistics: Posted by roknjohn — Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:05 am — Replies 0 — Views 3

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