What it detects
- People and vehicles, distinguished from animals, weather and shadows. This is the foundation and the reason alerts become useful.
- Number plates, read at gates and driveways and matched against lists.
- Zones and lines: a person entering an area you have drawn, or crossing a boundary.
- Dwell and loitering: someone lingering near an entrance for longer than normal.
- Heat maps: where people actually walk over a day or a week, which is where cameras, lights and signage should be.
How accurate it is
On a well-placed camera in reasonable light, person and vehicle detection is reliable enough for monitoring operators to act on directly. Accuracy drops with distance, rain on the lens, extreme backlight and cameras pointed at the horizon. The single biggest factor is placement, which is why a site walk beats a plan.
What it is not
It is not facial recognition unless you specifically deploy that for access, with the privacy steps that go with it. General analytics track a person as a person. They do not know who the person is, and that is the right default.
What to ask a provider
- Show me detection working at night on a real site.
- What happens to an event: who sees it, how fast, and what do they do?
- Can I search footage by event, vehicle or plate?
- Where does the analysis run, on the camera, on the recorder or in the cloud, and what does that cost monthly?
- How are zones and rules changed, and by whom?
Where the analysis runs, and why it matters
Analytics can run on the camera itself, on the recorder at your site, or in the cloud. On-camera analytics keep working when the internet drops and cost nothing monthly, but each camera has to be capable. Recorder-based analytics let older cameras take part. Cloud analytics are the easiest to update and the most expensive to run, and they stop when the connection does.
Be Watch uses a mix: detection at the edge so events are raised even when the site is offline, with cloud clips and search so you can find anything from your phone. The point is that you should know which you are buying and what happens to it when the broadband fails.
The privacy questions to settle first
Who can view footage, for what purpose, and is every viewing logged? How long is footage kept? Is anyone identified by face, and if so have they been told and given a choice? Are there areas that are never covered? Answer those before the first camera goes up and the system will be trusted by the people who work under it, which is worth more than any feature.