Ip camera surveillance system with automated recording

In this article we present the results obtained at the installation and configuration of a video surveillance system for controlling the access in a building. The system uses an IP video camera (NC 1200) connected at a building LAN. The IP camera used allows the visualisation of images by Internet connection but, for recording images, admits only manual command from the human operator that supervises the entrance. The camera has embedded the function of sending an instant picture by e-mail or on a FTP server if the system disposes any of these two facilities. For this reason we created an application that automatically starts recording images, when a motion is detected in the supervised space. The application has the advantage of saving the image frames directly on the monitoring computer and eliminates the constraint to have an online server (FTP or e-mail) and also that permits no modification of the camera firmware, being installed only on the monitoring computer. We report here some preliminary results, with only one surveillance camera, but the system will be extended to several ones. We illustrate the advantage of using a cheap IP camera combined with the original application for entrance surveillance.