belphegor

We need to monitor a construction site in a remote location with no Internet connection. We found a good location for a camera from a third story window of an adjacent barn that overlooks the driveway but is not immediately visible. The reason for a camera is to identify vehicles uses for stealing construction materials. The idea is to install a Mobotix M12D SEC with both lenses 135mm and to store the images in the camera's internal SD card and retrieve the card in case of an incident. There would be no network and no server, just the camera and a power adaptor. Do you think this is the right setup? Would you recommend a better solution? Thank you for any help and keep the great work with this forum!

Yes, indeed, I was just saying that the image we see on the page was made with a camera that did record 4 x times more pixel (it says on the right), which is probably one of the reasons it is so dark, but with self-lit license plates it should work. I will add a large motion activated projector from another part of the building where the camera is placed so that we'll have plenty of light and should solve it. It will bring the thieves attention to the wrong side of the building so it definitely won't show the camera. For the "trail" type of cameras I could only conceal it if they had tele lenses, then we could place them some distance away and not be spotted. What do you think?

Yes, we thought of putting another camera next to the house, but it would have to be concealed in the trees and operate on batteries only, like the Stealth Cam Prowler HD (a game camera). The problem is that these things are really quite visible and if the thieves are tipped off by people working on site they'll just steal the camera. I haven't found a location that's safe for the camera and has electricity. But from the window of the other building where we plan to put the Motobix, you can actually see to the construction site (100m), you wouldn't get details but it would be clear that people are not just turning back. You'd probably sort of see (very small) them cut the chain at the entrance.

Thanks guys - your combined years of experience make for very useful comments. Can it pick a license plate at night? On the Romanian install of the Mobotix cam linked above, the image is 640x480, that's, a quarter of the pixels actually recorded. With 4 times more pixel should we not be able to see the plates? Yes protecting is the first option, but you can't really protect anything. A guy with a hammer would be able to break a window and enter the construction site and take what he wants. I'd rather be realistic about this. 4-5 cameras are not possible at this stage (no Internet, no network, necessity to conceal those cameras, etc...) What would ilk and tomcctv recommend as a better option?

Thanks for these very good points! First let me explain that the road that goes into the property actually passes right before the window with the camera, so I could aim it closer and have the license plate less than 10m away from the camera, although from a rather high angle. Mobotix lists its L135 Telephoto Lens as having 15° horizontal angle, 11° vertical angle, yielding an image width at a distance of 10 m of 2.6 x 1.9 m, that's about the width of the road in other words. Now for illumination, certainly there won't be enough in the dead of night, but if I'm not mistaken license plates are lit by the car and I'll have a couple of those garden lamps that light up when they sense movement. With 1MP and the relatively larger cells in the sensor, would that not be enough for license plate identification? Now for the cops, you are right that just the image in itself is not incriminating enough to get a conviction, but we'll know the identity of the people who stole the goods, so the rest of the proof should be forthcoming and a search warrant possible - or so we hope!

Yes, in our case we have all sorts of wild boars and roe deers so we'd be flooded with false alarms - no way to monitor each even triggered by camera. All we can try to achieve is deter thieves from coming (locked gates, promise of terrible karma if they steal, etc...) and then try to get a good view of their car. I don't think the cops would do much with a headshot only - too much work for them. But with the license plates, it's an easy win for their statistics.

Excellent point of course! Well, people steal so many things, some of them can't be put under lock. You dig up a hole, people will come to steal excellent garden soil and replace it with garbage from another construction site. This happens all the time. When you have to change windows, for some time anybody can enter the site. So there is, unfortunately, a limit to preventing the theft. But we suspect these sorts of thieves are not the the brighest LEDs on the panel, and would probably use their own cars which they would drive up to the house. So if it happens and we can get a readable license plate, the cops should bag them easy.

Thanks for your encouraging comments! The camera would be something like 3m / 10' off the ground, and with the 40m/120' distance to where it will be aimed, I think the angle should work. But that's a vital thing to check before we finalize the installation. It would be fitted inside a permanently left open frame, a bit like snipers who operates in cities do, since you aim at a distance the fact that the camera is a back in the room does not affect the usable field of view. That's so that nobody walks off with the camera itself. We'll also add some distractions and lame automatic lamps around the choke point so that thieves' attention will be attracted by something else. The plan is to collect the images only after a theft.