Re: Video Surveillance Requirements

[Patrick P Murphy <pmurphy () NRAO EDU>]

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:58:04 -0800, "Hudson, Edward"
   <ewhudson () CSUCHICO EDU> said:

> Our campus has a new student recreation center, run by our Associated
> Students.  The building has many surveillance cameras -- in the weight
> room, exercise class rooms, cardio room, outside the locker room, etc.
> Currently the facility has NO sign on the front door indicating that
> the building is under video surveillance.

> The AS is now interested in putting two of the video feeds on their
> public website so that students can check to see how busy the facility
> is, before they head over to work out.  The images are still (taken
> every 3 seconds) and only about 2 inches square.  However, if you look
> at the source code for the page you can navigate to the two cameras
> and zoom in on the images. The website is open to the public at large,
> not just the campus community.

What's clearly needed here is an extra layer between the cameras and the
public's viewing of them.  I could envisage a simple service (perhaps
not a cron job if it has to be every 3 seconds!) that copies the current
image to a location on a web server's DocumentRoot which is publicly
viewable.  That process could include blurring or image reduction.

Alternatively, a web service that the public can view which in turn runs
a server side app which *then* pulls the latest image from the camera
(presumably on an internal network), might work better.

It would probably take a skilled webtech a day's work to set up
something like that (maybe more, or less, depending on sophistication
level required).

You really don't want to cede control of surveillence cameras to the
internet :-)

Just my $0.02.

 - Pat

--
 Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.   Webmaster (East), Computing Security Manager
 http://www.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/          http://chien-noir.com/maze.shtml
 "Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
                                    -- Thomas Jefferson, August 13, 1813