In the outdoors, trying to accurately detect perimeter intrusions over large areas can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Moving foliage, wind, weather, even ripples in water can trigger nuisance alarms.

GPS positioning data plays a vital role in reducing perimeter security nuisance alarms.The key is to select intelligent videos cameras that have been designed from the ground up to be inherently “geo-registered.” This means that the camera’s field of view (FOV) maps the GPS coordinates of all points in the landscape under surveillance. Such an approach is fundamental to achieving high performance and accuracy in an intelligent video surveillance system.

For indoor surveillance where distances are small, geo-registration is not as important. But think about the outdoors, where blowing trash, moving leaves or small animals will constantly cross the camera’s view. In these cases, knowing an object’s actual size becomes more important.

That’s because cameras lack depth perception. To an outdoor camera, a small object that’s close to the camera will appear substantially larger than a person standing off in the distance. Without GPS details, the camera will likely ignore the human in the distance and send alarms for the closer objects. As a result, the system will generate an overwhelming number of nuisance alarms and quickly lose all accountability.

On the other hand, when an intelligent video camera uses GPS location information to monitor a scene, the camera can make very accurate decisions based on the size of all detected objects. GPS-based analytics allows the camera to filter the small animal while still detecting the human-sized intruder in the distance. When such cameras are designed with sufficient image processing to clean up the other outdoor issues (motion from wind, changing lighting, clutter from foliage, and weather), the result is comprehensive security.

Geo-registration, which can also be used to automatically steer PTZ cameras to track and follow targets, also has a direct impact on lowering project costs while leading to an installation that’s on time and on budget. We’ll return to this important topic in the future, so subscribe to the blog and never miss an update.