Video Surveillance Systems- Fresh Mango BVI

What is an IP Video Camera System?

An Internet protocol camera, or IP camera, is a type of digital video camera system commonly employed for surveillance, and which, unlike analog closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, can send and receive data via a computer network and the Internet. Although most cameras that do this are webcams, the term “IP camera” or “netcam” is usually applied only to those used for surveillance.

There are two kinds of IP cameras:

1. Centralized IP cameras, which require a central network video recorder (NVR) to handle the recording, video and alarm management.
2. Decentralized IP cameras, which do not require a central NVR, as the cameras have recording function built-in and can thus record directly to any standard storage media, such as SD cards, NAS (network-attached storage) or a PC/server.

IP cameras differ from previous generation analog cameras which transmitted video signals as a voltage, instead IP camera images are sent using the transmission and security features of the TCP/IP protocol, which provides numerous benefits:

1. Two-way audio via a single network cable allows users to listen to and speak to the subject of the video
2. The use of a Wi-Fi or wireless network
3. Distributed intelligence such as video analytics can be placed in the camera itself allowing the camera to analyze images
4. Transmission of commands for PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) cameras via a single network
5. Secure data transmission through encryption and authentication methods such as WPA, WPA2, TKIP, AES.
6. Remote accessibility which allows live video from selected cameras to be viewed from any computer, mobile smartphones and other devices (with sufficient access privileges).
7. PoE Power over Ethernet to supply power through the ethernet cable and operate without a dedicated power supply.