VIAAS Support

Camera Framing

Camera framing is deciding how you want to mount your VIAAS Camera. Your first decision is what do you want to see, and the second is how to best use your camera to accomplish it.

Deciding what you want to see is really a question of your goals. If you want to be able to recognize who is coming in and out of your lobby, place the camera someplace where it is likely to get a facial shot as they enter. If you want to watch cars in your parking lot, decide if you need license plates or not and mount the camera appropriately. These tend to be pretty easy decisions once you think about what you want to see on a video a week after the event occurred - what information do you need to make a decision, if what you see is the only data you have.

From a technical point of view there a two issues to consider - image quality and IntelEvent™ triggers.

Image Quality

For good image quality, you need light - the better the light, the better the image you will capture. Good light is bright and consistent across the entire frame. VIAAS Camera One Ultra High Dynamic Range is relatively immune to lighting issues. However, it is important to know it works by first making sure the darkest area of the image are good enough, then extending the dynamic range to cover the brightest areas. If you have poor image quality, the best fix is to increase the light in the darkest areas (<10 lux) or to adjust the camera framing to eliminate dark areas.

Another situation to avoid is sharp transitions in frame lighting. This is most often encountered as somebody opens a tinted door to a brightly lit outdoor area, flooding your room with light. In this situation, consider pointing the camera away from the door and capturing images as people leave, before they open the door on the way out.

The final consideration is low light . If you want very good performance at night with very low light, use an IR Illuminator. They are inexpensive and very effective. VIAAS Camera One works well in night mode on its own down to about 1lux, and has usable images down to 0.1lux. Almost any "legal" indoor workplace lighting including emergency lighting will work well. But when you want to catch the deer in your backyard by starlight, use an IR Illuminator.

VIAAS IntelEvent™ Capture

VIAAS Cameras use intelligent object based motion detection to capture images when things happen, and ignore what doesn't matter. It is tuned to fire aggressively, under the assumption you don't want to miss anything. It works extremely well, but it needs some help in certain circumstances.

The most common issue - you have things in the foreground you want to capture (people on a sidewalk) but things in the back ground (cars on the street) that move a lot. You end up with a huge number of images of cars and a few of people. Random small movement such as waves or trees in the wind are filtered effectively - the only issue is relatively large things moving coherently.

VIAAS IntelEvents offer two tools to help you, masks and sensitivity. Masks work if you have separation of location on the screen (the cars are in a different part of the screen from the people) and sensitivity works if you have different size objects (people in foreground are large, cars in background are small). If you don't have one of these, you need to re-frame the image - zoom in to narrow the field, mount the camera higher or lower to get better separation, or change the camera aim to eliminate one of the motion types.