Scruit

You can fit IR emitters - they don't need much range. Low power consumption cameras would mean manual iris / bullet stuff. Ebay is full of them, but the image quality is sketchy. You'd need a separate deep-cycle battery installed in the car with a automatic cutoff switch that would connect / charge the extra battery while you are driving but disconnect / not allow you to drain the primary battery if you leave the cameras running too long. There's a solid state single-channel DVR all over ebay that uses an SD car to record video/audio - that would give you longest life. I still wouldn't expect more than 2-3 days on that extra battery, but at least the cutoff will mean you don't drain your main battery. Multiple channel DVRs tend to need HDs and be power-hogs. My system uses about 3 to 4 amps steady state. That's 4 cameras, a GPS antenna, power timer, video overlay device and a 4channel DVR with a 250GB laptop hard drive in it.

I can press a button on my dash to make the DVR/cameras in my car stay on while the car is off. I'll do this if I'm parking for a short trip into a store, etc. A couple days ago I accidentally left the system running in my car from 5pm overnight. By noon the next day the battery was so flat that the door chime didn't even work! Power is going to be a challenge.

Sorry for the threadbump... But what was the outcome of this case? I'm researching real-world admissibility challenges to DVR footage. Is the video posted anywhere for us to see?

Camera with onboard IRs will do that in rain/snow/dust. I'll wager a small amount of money that the strange effect in the first pic (where the blob is see-through and overlapping, creating a whiter spot in the middle) is the result of an interlaced Full D1 image that shows a raindrop falling past the lens lit up by the onboard IR LEDs. The image is captured in two individual frames (that make up the single D1 image) - and although the individual frames are taken only a split-second apart, the raindrop has moved. This effect is more pronounced on fast-moving objects closer to the lens - and pausing the image makes it ten times worse! Any takers? You options are to mount the camera under an eave where it won't see the rain so close... Or to use a separate IR source that is mounted a couple feet away from the camera.

Before I begin, I'm not a CCTV expert - just a home user, so this comes with zero industry experience.... But... Doesn't seem like any of those 16 cameras are close enough to identify a person. Every entrance to my house has a camera right next to it so I get closeup face shots of everyone who approaches those doors. inside and out. My first reaction to seeing the 16-way monitor (other that "Hey, there's someone taking a picture of his monitor on channel 16... wait..") was "If someone breaks into his house all he's gonna get are pictures of some unidentifiable blobs ransacking his house. Like this: Some random group of kids (who went on to break into a house 2 doors down from me, but never got any closer to my house than this). This allows me to tell that there were people there but is useless for identification. This is close, but still a useless blob instead of an identifiable person Almost there: Now we're talking. I always dedicate each camera to asking one of the following questions; "Is there someone there?" "What are they doing?" "Who is it?" This camera was very picky. It had to be close enough that the door took up the whole shot - otherwise the open door would allow too much light in and cause the door to be washed out and the background to be too dark, resulting in a useless silhouette of a person. By moving the camera 18" closer to the door the lighting is much more consistent throughout the picture and therefore I get a better shot of the person. This kind of shot is what I call the "Wanted Poster" shot. This is, to me, the aim of CCTV evidence when it comes to tracking someone down (the only thing better than this would be the license plate shot) (Next project - polarizing lens makes the glass go away!) Again, I'm not an expert, but I've been fiddling with the 16 cameras at my house for about 6 years now. For your Ridgeline I'd probably be thinking about a motion light and a camera zoomed right up to the driver's door.

Scruit is lazy. I'll let Wiki do the 'splainin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel#The_colour_circle_and_colour_vision

Is this what you mean by negative view? I used MSPaint "Invert Colors"

Can I do the same thing by loading the jpg image into Photoshop and doing a "negative colors" filter? I have used photoshop in the past to adjust the brightness/contrast/hue of an image to make a plate more readable, and I have tried a negative view also. But that's in post-processing - I've never tried a negative camera... The negative view would be useless as a dashcam - ie it would render that camera as a license-plate-only camera. Is there something about the video being in negative that would make the plate easier to read? I have found that sometimes the interlacing of a full D1 image causes those jagged edges on objects that are fast-moving enough that the object moves between the two interlaced D1 frames. That makes a plate tough to read from a paused video image. The plate can be easier to read when played back very slowly verses just paused. I tried searching for examples of license plate cameras using negative images, but couldn't find any. Do you know where I could example pics?

Ok, here's the comparison of the In-The-Window camera versus the On-The-Towbar camera. "In the window" (Waiting at a red light) Pros: - Higher angle of view - can see either side of the vehicle behind me even if he's almost touching my bumper. - Inside the car is protected from the elements - I can use the little black box that shows what my brake lights/turn signals are doing - Can use an 'indoor' camera - Higher angle means cam won't be blinded by low beam headlights. (although at night you only see headlights) Cons: - Limited FOV due to the roof/parcel shelf/c-pillars - Tinted window reduces colors and makes it almost useless at night (can only see headlights) - Not able to see license plates "On the towbar" (Starbucks) Pros: - License plates!! If someone rear ends me (while parked or on the road) and they run then I have a good chance to getting a license plate to give to the police. - Better lighting and colors. - Although low beam headlight may blind the camera at regular following distances, once the car gets close enough to do any damage the headlight are no longer going to be visible the the camera. Cons: - Low angle means if a car is almost touching my bumper then that's all I'll see. - Have to mount my taillight box in view of a different camera. - Have to use a weatherproof camera and mount it in a way that won't allow it to be damaged under normal driving conditions (ie high slope driveways that sometimes catch my towbar, or if I back into a snow drift.)

Dangit - you got me thinking now. It's always dangerous to get me thinking. The rear-facing camera in my car is attached to the rear window using suction cups and it gives a relatively good view that is protected from the elements. However it's looking through tinted glass and is not able to read license plates. So I mounted a cheap fixed-iris weatherproof bullet camera to the top of my towbar. Next time I drive anywhere I'll pull the video and compare. With the camera in it's new location it should get plates from anyone who hits the back of my car (either in a parking lot on on the road). I'll post the results of the road test.

Sorry for the delay in responding. Completely forgot about this thread. I've been toying witht he idead of switching my car's rear-facing camera from being inside the rear window to being mounted on the towbar instead. I have a waterproof camera that should work fine. The way I see it you have a few problems to overcome: 1) Lighting level: - Camera being blinded by headlights or sun Cameras with fixed iris lenses are terrible at handling extremes of light. A car with it's headlights on facing towards your camera will blind your camera. An auto-iris camera will do better but you're still likely to have problems reading the front plate because the plate will be relatively dark compared to the rest of the scene. Solution? Some kind of additional illumination (IR, 950nm to be invisible to people) and an IR pass filter on the lens will reject all non-IR lights. It'll turn the scene to black and white but will give you a much better chance of seeing the plate. 2) Field of view: - Wider means less camera to cover the whole area, but less chance of catching the plate. Tighter means more chance of catching the plate (if the car comes into view) but less chance of the car passing through the field of view. Solution? Try to predict where the car will be when it hits you. If you are talking about people sideswiping you on the way past then you could try to mount one camera facing where the rear plate will be as the car is driving away. If you park on the road (facing with traffic, not against it) then you can have one auto-iris camera fixed on the lane immediately to the front/left of your car at about 45deg. The rear-facing camera will face the opposite lane to catch the rear plate of those cars - however I'd be surprised if you were sideswiped by an oncoming car as it would have to be on the wrong side of the road to hit you.... If you are worried about someone bumping into you as they parallel park then you can try a camera mounted at bumper level - the light level might not be a problem because once the car gets close enough to hit you it's headlights won't be shining on the camera. A camera mounted at the front also will do the same job. 3) Battery life: - Even if not recording, the DVR will take some juice. A single ebay bullet camera that was left on in my Maxima would run the battery down in 3 days. Solution? A deep-cycle battery connected to your main battery with a automatic cutover switch. When the engine is running it charges the DVR battery. When the engine is off the DVR battery runs the DVR. If you run the DVR battery flat then the car still starts no problem. That switch may cost you $100. Battery would be about $75. Sorry for the delay in responding. Completely forgot about this thread. I've been toying witht he idead of switching my car's rear-facing camera from being inside the rear window to being mounted on the towbar instead. I have a waterproof camera that should work fine. The way I see it you have a few problems to overcome: 1) Lighting level: - Camera being blinded by headlights or sun Cameras with fixed iris lenses are terrible at handling extremes of light. A car with it's headlights on facing towards your camera will blind your camera. An auto-iris camera will do better but you're still likely to have problems reading the front plate because the plate will be relatively dark compared to the rest of the scene. Solution? Some kind of additional illumination (IR, 950nm to be invisible to people) and an IR pass filter on the lens will reject all non-IR lights. It'll turn the scene to black and white but will give you a much better chance of seeing the plate. 2) Field of view: - Wider means less camera to cover the whole area, but less chance of catching the plate. Tighter means more chance of catching the plate (if the car comes into view) but less chance of the car passing through the field of view. Solution? Try to predict where the car will be when it hits you. If you are talking about people sideswiping you on the way past then you could try to mount one camera facing where the rear plate will be as the car is driving away. If you park on the road (facing with traffic, not against it) then you can have one auto-iris camera fixed on the lane immediately to the front/left of your car at about 45deg. The rear-facing camera will face the opposite lane to catch the rear plate of those cars - however I'd be surprised if you were sideswiped by an oncoming car as it would have to be on the wrong side of the road to hit you.... If you are worried about someone bumping into you as they parallel park then you can try a camera mounted at bumper level - the light level might not be a problem because once the car gets close enough to hit you it's headlights won't be shining on the camera. A camera mounted at the front also will do the same job. 3) Battery life: - Even if not recording, the DVR will take some juice. A single ebay bullet camera that was left on in my Maxima would run the battery down in 3 days. Solution? A deep-cycle battery connected to your main battery with a automatic cutover switch. When the engine is running it charges the DVR battery. When the engine is off the DVR battery runs the DVR. If you run the DVR battery flat then the car still starts no problem. That switch may cost you $100. Battery would be about $75. This setup would require 4 cameras. The front/rear bumper cameras could be relatively cheap non auto-iris. The diagonal license plate camera would need to be auto-iris and possibly even with an IR cut filter / IR emitter so that it can deal with the glare of taillights that the wider FOV will give. You also need one overall camera that will explain what the target car did. License #s are useless unless you can prove the car with that license # did something wrong. Not a final solution - just a starting point for discussion.

There are too many cards out there to tell you what framerates are unless you look at a specific manufacturer, I will add that he more expensive brand-name cards will have more of the video processing onboard using hardware which reduces the load on the PC's CPU. Cheaper cards (ebay specials) will rely on the CPU to do the processing and that makes the framerate lower and the PC is usually running at 99% CPU usage all the time. As far as watching your child... Make sure you know your local laws on privacy and CCTV, especially as relates to audio. There are some rooms that may be off-limits also. You need to use the highest framerate you can get because situations involving physical struggles between people are generally very dynamic and fast-moving scenes that would be difficult to prove with a low framerate. I know of one nanny-cam case where the low framerate of the camera caused the footage to be thrown out. It was something like 3 or 4 FPS and the judge said the "shaking" that the video showed could have been misinterpreted. In your situation I'd say at least 15fps is what you need. My home DVR runs at a lower framerate (10fps) but runs in full quality because it's intended to provide evidence to help track down the bad guy and the higher framerate is not needed to be able to tell exactly what the BG is doing (ie If he's walking out the door with my TV!). In my car the DVR is set at lower quality (CIF) and higher framerate (realtime/30fps) becuause car accidents can be very dynamic and fast-moving (just like physical altercations) and a low framerate video may give the viewer an inaccurate perception of the incident. It's unlikely my footgae will help track down a hit/run unless the video catches something unique about the other car. The license plat would be nice but getting that on film is too much of a challenge given consumer-level off-the-shelf technology. Maybe an 8mp cam running through a fisheye lens with dewarping software...

My 4ch DVR ("All about image recognition and Processing" branded) is on it's 2nd HD, had it 5 years. The 9ch (CPCam CPD576W) is still on it's 2nd HD after 3 years, but only because I upgraded for more capacity. My 16ch (CPCam 507HC) is on it's original HD but that's only about a year old. The DVR in my car (Aver EB1304MOB puked it's first HD after about a year and I installed a 250GB laptop hard drive in it's place, that's been in there about 3mo now) My biggest problem with HD longevity in DVRs is that the early signs of problems tended to have been visible in the recorded video, so diligence is required to ensure it is all working normally. I have a weekly maintenance routine that takes about 10 mins and includes checking the logs for signs of vloss or HD problems, and playing back segments of video from each DVR. If you want a solid HD that will run for years at 24x7 then get one from a supplier of commercial datacenter equipment. If you buy a hard drive from Dell's business server operation then it's designed to run 24x7, although you may IDE tough to get hold of these days as servers tednt o run SATA or SAS HDs. Consumer HDs may not be designed to run all the time. I personally run consumer HDs because they are cheaper and are throwaways - as long as you spot faults immediately.

If you sprinkle when you tinkle please be sweet and wipe MY GARAGE DOOR!!!

I wrote a program in Visual Basic that can sense when my driveway monitor is triggered by using a USB digital I/O card hooked up to the relay output on the driveway monitor receiver. I have a computer with 2 video capture cards (one hooked up to the driveway camera loop-out, one connected to the 9-way split) and I use BooruWebCam to save an image to disk every couple of seconds. I have the DVR (CPCam) set to FTP any motion images to an FTP server on that computer. When the Visual Basic program senses the driveway monitor is does a few things: 1) Takes a copy of both video images from the capture computer 2) Takes a copy of any image from the incoming FTP folder that is less than 60 seconds old. 3) Emails all those images my personal email account. 4) FTPs a copy of those images to my person webspace at my ISP so I log log in from the web and see them 5) Saves a copy of those images to a hard drive that is hidden behind the drywall in my study. 6) Pages me to tell me this all went down. 7) Repeats all of this 20 seconds later so I can tell if the person is still at the house or has left. So when I am sitting at work and someone enters my driveway the sequence of events is that my pager goes off with a special ringtone dedicated to the driveway monitor. If I'm near my computer I click on the bookmark to my ISP webspace where I can see the FTPd images. Otherwise I use my blackberry to view the same images. If I see an unrecognized vehicle at my house and then get a call from ADT then I can tell them there is a confirmed burglar on site and the police will step up the response from "Alarm Drop" to "Burglary in progress" Took a while to get it right, but it works great now.

I have both brands. AVTech has more features but was a little flaky at first (turned out my DVR closet was too hot, fixing the heat stopped the DVR problems) The AVTech's remote software is not as good, has a few bugs etc. The one that gets me is I can't use the USB digital export feature when I'm using motion detect because the change in framerate between non-motion (1fps) and motion (10fps) causes the speed of the playback to change - ie The action will start at normal speed at 1fps but when the video reaches a section of motion and ramps up to 15fps the action gets very slow because it thinks the video is still at 1fps. Also, the network connection is flaky and I have to reboot the DVR at least once a week because the ftp-image function will quit working. I'm actually going to write a computer program to check the status of the network connection on a regular basis and send me a text message when the network connection stops working. The avermedia 1304 (I have the mobile version) is very stable, good image, but doesn't have motion masking (ie you cannot specify an area of the screen where motion is expected and should not trigger the recorder)

I've been working on several versions of my dashcam setup for 7 years now, so I know a thing or two about putting cameras in cars. What you are describing - a setup that allows you to read license plates at any angle 24x7 is not something that's easy to do. If not impossible given current technology. The basic problem is the field of view of the camera. The narrower the better for reading a plate, but then you lose coverage area. I generally find that a D1 image needs to be about as wide as the car to be assured of a good plate read. That being said, you'd need something like 16 or 32 cameras in a circle to get that kind of detail over every possible angle. A traditional dashcam faces forward because the designer knows that that is where the action will most likely be. In your case the direction of the action is difficult to predict. You may find that capturing the plate vs capturing the action require to different cameras. Also bear in mind that you'll run a car battery flat overnight if you run pretty much any multi-camera setup. Could you post a diagram of the street / where you park relative to you house? I'd suspect that you'd get better results from a collection of cameras on the house - one wide-angle showing the whole street, one medium FOV image showing the actual car and about one car length either side, and then a couple with hi mm lenses that capture the license plates at choke points further up the street. If you insist on a car-based camera that can capture license plates at any angle then you could try a hi-megapixel camera with a fisheye lens looking directly up. Then you could use dewarping software to 'fold' the image back to a normal viewing angle and the megapixel resolution might let you 'zoom in' and read the plate. Dunno if this can even be done, but it's an interesting idea. http://www.sunex.com/dslr/360pano.htm

I attached a camera to the end of a fish tape and took pictures of the entire duct system before and after they came to clean it. ...I sent the pics to Sears with my demand that they come back to clean the ducts that they missed first time around.

The DVR for my house is set to D1 10fps and this provides all the information I need for any potential burlgary/vandalism type incident. Good detail, enough motion to show where people are and what they are doing and although you lose a little of the sense of fast-moving dynamic action it's a good trade-off. In my car my dashcam is set to CIF 30fps because the level of detail I need is not that great (I can see the car, lines in the road, streaat signs etc) but the action on a dashcam is much more dynamic and fast-paced and the nuances of certain types of motion are vital to tell the story. For example, my dashcam caught a road rage incident where a driver intentionally slammed his door into my fender. At a lower frame rate you might just have see the door in it's starting and ending positions with no real sense of the amount of force used. At full frame video the acceleration of the door was clear and was convincing enough for the prosecutor to file charges and get a guilty plea.

Yank the battery.

I have this DVR under the brand name "All About Image Recognition and Processing" Default admin pwd for mine was "1"

I caught this incident on my dashcam: I don't know what the other guy said to the cop, but after hearing his side of the story the first cop was going to write this up as an collision and blame me! If we had 'collided' then it *would* have been my fault, I later learned. After pointing out the dashcam the cop & the other guy spoke again and the cop suddenly was on my side. The damage cost about as much as my camera system - so I say the camera paid for itself here.

I troubleshoot IR devices using my camera phone. IR Emitters, Garage Door safety sensors, Remote Controls etc.

Bear in mind that indoor color domes may not be set up for sunlight / IR filter etc. The colors may look strange.

I have a camera like this in my car as a rear-facing dashcam: But it doesn't have an IR filter so grass appears yellow etc. Does anyone know of a camera of this size that sees colors correctly outdoors? EDIT: It looks like all I need to do is get a mini-lens that is IR coated to preserver colors under sunlight. Having trouble finding such a lens (without having to buy another camera). Anyone know where I can get such a lens - probably in ~3mm for a wide angle.