Why is the quality of surveillance cameras so bad?

 

Photography enthusiasts and close followers of modern photography and camera technologies know the amount of development that has occurred in these machines during the last decade, and how they have become much smaller than before, lighter weight, and more widespread. There is at least one camera that you can find near you, whatever your location and wherever you go. It may be on someone's phone, on the side of the road in the main streets to monitor traffic, or it may be hovering over your head for aerial photography, or it may be standing at the entrances of buildings, in shops, offices and various institutions, or automated teller machines for security purposes.

 

Without a doubt, improving the quality of the captured images is one of the things that have been on top of the priorities of the developers of these devices all along, and this was evident with the development of high dynamic range imaging technologies in HDR cameras, and in the quality and accuracy of imaging cameras of newer versions of smartphones and digital cameras that The accuracy of its sensors has sometimes reached 12 megapixels, and the quality of photos and videos captured using it reaches 4K at a rate of 60 frames per second.

 

Despite all this development, we note that the quality of imaging of CCTV cameras or circuit television used in surveillance systems is still very low compared to others, so the images in the videos they capture look grainy, blurry, and monochromatic, like the pictures taken by phone cameras about two decades ago. Time, what is the reason behind this? Especially if the purpose of using these cameras is primarily a security objective and would help in identifying criminals and saboteurs, which requires more accuracy. Let us know the reason behind this from the following lines.

 

What is CCTV?

 

They are systems used for surveillance purposes that consist of video cameras that may be fixed or moveable, distributed so that they cover a specific area or several areas to record video footage and transmit it to a display screen or a group of screens connected to it in real-time. The cameras are also connected via wires to a digital video recorder to record and retain video footage and to a control panel through which the system as a whole is managed.

 

The monitoring system can also send notifications to the user in the event of observing unusual activity or unfamiliar movement in the monitored area, such as notifying the owner of the company during the night hours and after the employees leave, for example, that there are people moving in the place unusually at that time, or that Someone's about to break into the facility.

 

What is CCTV made of and how does it work?

 

A CCTV system consists of a video camera, at least one lens, a display screen, and a video recorder, and more of these components can be used to configure more complex surveillance systems depending on the area to be monitored. A single camera or group of cameras captures images in a fixed sequence, and then sends them wirelessly or using cables (depending on the type of system used) to a video recording device, and then also to a display or group of monitors that enable an individual to see the sequence of images in the form of video footage.

 

Depending on the type of cameras used, most of these systems also provide additional features through which to control the captured images such as zoom in, zoom out or rotating 360 ​​degrees.

 

Why is the quality of surveillance cameras still so low?

 

Dear reader, you may have watched a video clip on the Internet before of one of the accidents on the roads or theft incidents in one of the shops or public facilities and stopped in front of the poor quality photography despite the ability of these facilities to pay a lot of money to buy the best technologies and monitoring systems to protect people Or property and wondered why these people were not able to photograph quality even though high-quality cameras are already available and are in the smartphones carried by millions of people around the world.

 

The crucial point in the matter is the main purpose of using each of these cameras in order to suit their features optimally for their use. In contrast to smartphone cameras, which prefer to be small in size, light in weight, and take pictures with bright colors, the cameras of surveillance systems are not required to be very small in size or capture colors with high accuracy, but they must be distinguished by their ability to take pictures in different conditions. Low light, and in cases of high contrast colors such as the person to be monitored is wearing dark clothes at night, so many cameras use infrared surveillance systems that can illuminate dark areas in order to be able to take good pictures.

 

Surveillance cameras installed at high altitudes capture a wide image of the street or the surrounding spatial space, and the ability to zoom or zoom without distorting the image or losing its features is another feature that distinguishes surveillance system cameras over smartphone cameras whose images suffer from pixel defect or image distortion When using the optical zoom or zoom feature.

 

Of course, there are types of digital cameras that do this to an excellent degree as well, such as a DSLR. We should also not forget that surveillance systems need to have very large storage capacities. Cameras may keep running for hours or days without stopping, which is not the case with other types of imaging technologies, including digital cameras.

 

It is expected that about 99.9% of the photos and videos that were taken and recorded by CCTV cameras during these hours and days are insignificant and only indicate a normal situation and stable security conditions unless something unusual happens, so many people resort to buying the cheapest CCTV cameras quality to reduce the cost and maintenance of their security system.

 

There is also an important point worth noting, which is that the goal of using surveillance system cameras may not be limited to filming and monitoring the street, the work environment, or the house in high quality all the time, but its presence in itself may have a more security goal as a tool to deter criminals and discourage them from committing their crimes. For example, a thief may refrain from stealing from a place he knows is being monitored all the time using cameras.

 

For this reason, some business owners may turn off surveillance cameras for a while, content with the idea of ​​them in and of themselves as a deterrent to theft even if they are not working as long as potential criminals do not know it. In some other cases, when those criminals are aware of the cameras in a place, they strive to hide their features, which makes the images taken using the surveillance cameras are not useful in revealing the identity of the criminals, whatever their quality and the maximum possible benefit from them, in this case, is to determine the time The exact occurrence of the crime.

 

Factors that may limit the imaging quality of CCTV cameras

 

There are many factors that may be responsible for the low quality of the surveillance system cameras such as the cost of the surveillance system used as a whole, the cost of periodic maintenance and repair in case of failure, the quality of the lenses used, the internal pressure and video recording settings, and other reasons that we detail below:

 

Monitoring system installation cost

 

When a person wants to install a surveillance system in his home, workplace, or company, he will find hundreds of settings and options for cameras available in the market, and of course, the possibilities and advantages that one can get from his security system depend on the budget that he will allocate for this purpose, the cost of the surveillance system ranges, For example, the basic one, which consists of 4 cameras and a receiver, is between 300-400 US dollars, and obtaining monitoring systems that cover larger areas or have higher capabilities in terms of sensor quality, pressure, structural stability, and weather resistance require paying additional costs that may reach to thousands of US dollars as the monitoring systems used by large companies.

 

Internal pressure and video recording settings

 

As mentioned before; CCTV cameras are usually required to be able to operate and record non-stop video over long periods of time, ranging from 24 hours to several months before their clips are archived or deleted. Therefore, these systems sometimes compress the size of the video being filmed internally before recording it to take up less space than the storage capacity of the system, and of course, this affects the quality and accuracy of the video footage.

 

This stage can sometimes be just the first step in a series of compressions that the system performs on the video footage to be able to store entire hours, days, and weeks of shooting and keep them on the hard drive. Shooting a single video over the course of an entire day using only one TV camera alone may need to occupy a storage space of up to a full terabyte of data, what about a surveillance system consisting of dozens of cameras that work over several days or weeks?! Some companies keep the recorded video clips for at least two days before they are deleted, but some major companies and organizations do not delete the recorded clips before a month has passed, which requires very high storage capacities and compresses the size of the video files to the maximum extent possible.

 

Regular maintenance of CCTV cameras

 

Most surveillance cameras are designed for outdoor photography so they are installed in the streets and at entrances to buildings and shops, so they are supposed to withstand a variety of weather conditions, and because they are made up of electronic circuits and parts, however, they remain more susceptible to malfunctions, damage and corrosion due to environmental and storm conditions, such as severe rain and storm It also affects the quality and clarity of the images you take, so some cameras occasionally need to have their lenses cleaned or completely replaced, and one of the reasons for the extremely low imaging quality of some security cameras is the lack of such regular maintenance.

 

Video file format

 

The platform that will display the video footage recorded using CCTV also plays an active role in affecting the quality of this footage, as it may sometimes be subject to additional compression processes in order for its format to be compatible to display on these platforms. For example, sites like YouTube sometimes compress videos before posting them on the site, which significantly affects their accuracy.

 

Crop and Zoom

 

The CCTV cameras used in surveillance systems usually photograph frames that extend at wide angles, not focusing on a specific area of ​​the frame. But when capturing an unfamiliar event like a burglary or theft, for example, people often want to find a specific, useful detail in the middle of the whole picture that leads them to the culprit, such as a dashboard, for example, so they resort to focusing on, cropping and zooming in exactly where the painting appears It fills the entire screen size, and this expansion in the size of the pixels eventually leads to a lower resolution and a lower quality of the image displayed at the end

 

Summary |The issue of the low quality of images and video footage captured using CCTV cameras used in surveillance systems may seem a confusing issue despite the recent development of imaging technologies significantly, but the reason behind this may be due to a number of factors.

 

Besides the fact that the main purpose of using this type of camera is to shoot high frames of wide ranges of streets or buildings in low light conditions and high levels of color contrast and record them over very long periods of time, which is behind the low quality of the images we see on the Internet Video footage captured using surveillance cameras has criteria such as choosing surveillance systems with settings and capabilities that suit the total cost of the budget allocated for insurance and protection purposes.

 

In addition to the failure of some to perform the necessary periodic maintenance operations for the cameras in order for the monitoring system to continue to work with the same efficiency, this system performed a series of compression operations for the recorded video files in order to be able to record and keep them on the hard disk for days and months without losing or needing For deletion, some other platforms and websites do more compression and formatting of video files before displaying them, unless the same person cuts and enlarges them as well to focus on a specific detail or point in the whole image, which in turn affects the quality and accuracy of the captured images.