General ideology of the VideoSpider system.
Distribution.
The VideoSpider video surveillance system is designed to organize multi-channel network video surveillance.
Unlike most security systems designed to operate in local mode, VideoSpider is useful specifically for network use.
If you need to organize surveillance of several hundred cameras from several dozen workstations (and the cameras and workstations are geographically distributed), then the VideoSpider system will be extremely convenient.
At the same time, the system can be easily expanded by adding new cameras (servers) and client workstations.
Streaming video transportation.
The system's focus on distributed surveillance determined the streaming implementation of network interaction.
Video data collected on the server is sent to the client as a stream of packed data.
The streaming ideology allows network clients to watch data immediately from the moment they are received (with a delay for digitization and network transmission).
In this case, data can be simultaneously delivered to several clients, and also recorded in the archive.
MPEG1 hardware compression.
The VideoSpider system supports a number of video input devices that perform MPEG1 hardware compression.
A format designed for video stream compression and using interframe coding technology, it allows achieving a smaller stream size compared to «static» compression algorithms (for example, Wavelet, JPEG, and others).
MPEG4 compression support.
Since 2002, the VideoSpider system has supported the MPEG4 compression format.
Using the new format allows achieving even greater compression with the same quality or better quality with the same compression.
And if the first MPEG4 solution was a «software compression» familiar to this market, when data is packaged programmatically, using server resources, then new solutions are focused on hardware compression.
Constantly evolving system capabilities.
The VideoSpider system provides a «standard» set of capabilities required for surveillance systems, which is constantly being replenished with new ones.
The motion detector, which allows for a quick response to the appearance of objects in the camera, has recently been expanded with a static object detector: an alarm signal is given when the static scene changes, which allows for a response to both the appearance of new objects in the frame (detection of abandoned items, bombs, etc.) and the disappearance of objects (protection of objects).
The ability to connect external alarm sensors to peripheral ports of the computer (parallel port, serial port), PTZ cameras (Pan-Tilt Zoom), recording by schedule, alarm signal (with pre-alarm interval), in frame-by-frame (time-lapse) mode is supported.
Programmable additional features (SDKs).
Like any large system, VideoSpider cannot satisfy all needs. Many features are potentially embedded in the system and can be implemented by programming additional modules.
For this purpose, developer toolkits — Software Development Kits — are provided.
They allow you to connect your own sensors (alarm sources) to the system, expand the list of supported telemetry protocols (Pan-Tilt Zoom), and even develop your own applications for managing system parameters or accessing monitored video streams.
Support for original equipment manufacturers (OEM).
New hardware solutions from Darim are designed not only for use in the VideoSpider system.
Special tools are being developed that allow third-party software developers to use them as data sources.