Video surveillance has come on in leaps and bounds as more options become available to organizations looking to protect their premises and improve their operations. But with more and more connected devices from different manufactures making up the system, management, maintenance and monitoring across all devices can be challenging.
To address this Axis recommends using Axis Camera Station, which integrates with network cameras for centralized management. This provides a single, intuitive interface that gives users a full overview of all their devices and allows them to manage key actions. The software supports the complete Axis portfolio, including cameras, audio, wireless IO, door station products, encoders and decoders.
To get network devices working together is essentially like one chain. If one link in the chain gets broken, it affects the performance of the whole network. This may result in a range of problems, some of which we have covered previously in this blog post.
Below we examine a few ways AXIS Camera Station can help with network system management, improve the whole system’s performance and increase efficiency.
Easy and intuitive operation
AXIS Camera Station has been developed with the user in mind so almost any (authorized) personnel can access the software to navigate, manage incidents and take action. AXIS Camera Station allows for video viewing and retrieval from multiple servers, both locally and remotely. This means that from one interface, a user can handle multiple cameras, in multiple stores, which is handy for large numbers of cameras in multi-site organizations, such as retailers. This level of scalability is especially useful for organizations who may also add additional cameras and additional sites in the future. They only need to purchase the video management software once then add additional licences as needed. This means they can continue to grow their system while knowing they can easily continue to manage their cameras through the software they are familiar with.
Quick response
With AXIS Camera Station, users can shift to and from different cameras and servers, as well as flick between live streams to recordings for incident management. Furthermore, AXIS Camera Station supports remote viewing from mobile devices. If something should occur, users can review the footage and receive alerts, without needing to be on-site to assess whether action needs to be taken.
Recordings analysis and export
AXIS Camera Station also features many tools to help manage recorded footage more easily if a suspected incident occurs. Smart Search allows users to input a time period and location that they want to review. The system will then return thumbnails of all incidents that happened within the specified area and timeframe. Please see how this works in more detail in the below video. Another key feature is incident reports, which helps with the packaging of evidence for export to authorities, if criminal activity has taken place.
To comply with regulations, users may need to export video recordings where some of the objects are masked. Video redaction in AXIS Camera Station is easy and intuitive. From video requests by customers, to clean video evidence for investigation purposes, this feature offers a simple way to extract video upon request, protecting third-party privacy.
Create and manage specified actions and events
Network video can be integrated with other network devices on the system, such as audio products. Using analytics, these can be linked to trigger certain actions if a specified event takes place. E.g. if a sensor is triggered on a door to show it has been opened when the building should be locked and vacated, it could automatically trigger a light to come on, the camera to start recording and a horn speaker to play a pre-recorded warning to a potential intruder. These sorts of scenarios can be set up and managed in AXIS Camera Station.
System management and maintenance
It is also easy to manage system settings within AXIS Camera Station for everything from configuration through to operation and export. AXIS Camera Station supports customizable features, such as flexible live view, action buttons, themes, user permissions and can perform tasks retrospectively as required, such as using analytics to easily find any video upon request.
Further, maintenance on the whole system can be carried out through AXIS Camera Station. This is especially important as cyber attacks become a more critical risk to physical security than ever, as explained in this post. In addition, if something happens to any device it can be identified and the problem addressed using system health monitoring.
It also has an impressive recording capacity, with a validated solution for 140 TB of video data on a single server. Furthermore, it is possible to connect ONVIF compliant third-party cameras to the system.