2. History of CCTV Camera and Surveillance System

Today cameras are everywhere, you say it and that device might have a camera installed into it. Mobiles and Laptops are veterans now. In today’s world, you can also find a camera on TV, Sun Glasses, Smart Watch, etc. The fact is that you are walking down a street and possibly 10 cameras are spying on you.

Relax, don’t panic, it’s just a possibility. Let’s get to the point and discuss where actually it started from and who was the one behind this amazing technology. Before that let us understand some terms:

• What is CCTV?
  • As per Wikipedia, Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors.
• Whereas the Surveillance System?
  • Any hardware or software which is connected to CCTV for recording, maintaining, retrieving, and analyzing the footage are together called the Surveillance System.

The Birth of CCTV: Siemens AG was the 1st.

• The year 1942: Walter Bruch was the one who designed the 1st CCTV camera publicly known to the world. This was installed on a V-2 war rocket for its launch monitoring purpose. The whole project was developed by Siemens AG in Germany.

Commercialization of CCTV: A government contractor named Vericon did this first.

• The year 1949: This was the year when the 1st commercialization of CCTV cameras took place in the US. It was done by an American government contractor named Vericon. They started promoting the same and the setup only consists of CCTV cameras and monitors for live monitoring. Recording the footage was still a challenge.

Old-age video recordings: Reel-to-reel recording systems.

• Year in between 1949 – 1968: Somewhere between these years reel-to-reel recording systems were introduced. These were nothing but magnetic tapes which had to be winded every time once the recording is completed. Quite cumbersome and due to a lot of manual intervention this rare system didn’t work out well in the market.

The invention of VCRs: Video Cassette Recordings swept the world.

• The year 1968: If you are the 80s-90s kids then you must have surely enjoyed songs on a Tape recorder which uses magnetic cassettes to play tunes. But there was a problem here, whenever one side ends we have to manually swap it to the other side and hear the rest of the music.

Something similar happened here, as the world was swept away by this amazing invention. Due to its wide availability and popularity, even Surveillance systems adopted it. As the result, some amount of automation was brought into this because of which post setup the system could run by themselves. Users can now watch the recorded footage as and when needed.

VCRs had a major reusability and storage problem which means the user can’t record long footages thus had to maintain libraries for the same.

Facts: You know, Olean, New York was the first city in the World to install CCTV cameras along its main street.

Multiplexing: Connecting multiple CCTV’s to one monitor.

• The year 1990’s: During the 1990s where technology saw a major turn around and upgrade, CCTV was also not behind. A major breakthrough came when Multiplexing solutions were introduced. In layman’s terms, Multiplexing is nothing but combining multiple video signals from multiple CCTV cameras and displayed on one monitor. 

VCR’s replaced by DVR’s: Going digital.

• The year 2000’s: At this point of time where technology was shrinking day by day like, Desktops into Laptops, Cassettes into CD’s, CRT into Flat Screen TV, etc. Surveillance systems also took a huge leap where VCR’s were replaced by DVR’s (Digital Video Recorder). These recorders had everything pre-installed in them like the Multiplexer and other essential components. Even video tapes were replaced by Hard Disks (HD).

NVR’s were introduced: Multi-location HD viewing experience through network/internet.

• The year 2005’s: As DVR technology was widely accepted and popular across the industry, it had its own con’s. DVR worked perfectly fine for shops, huge factories, and premises but it couldn’t deliver the requirement when it comes to multi-location surveillance. For example: If an office HQ in Mumbai has its 30 branches across PAN India then DVR systems fail to deliver. To solve this issue NVR’s were introduced.
  
  NVR’s (Network Video Recorder)
  As per Wikipedia, A network video recorder (NVR) is a specialized computer system that includes a software program that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, or other mass storage device. An NVR contains no dedicated video capture hardware.

In NVR, multiple CCTV cameras are connected through a network or internet which is then encoded and decoded using various codecs. Which is then saved on multiple storage options like SSD, Local Drives, Cloud, etc. The advantage of using this technology is that the user can review the footage from any corner of the world where the internet is available.

Artificial Intelligence:

• The year 2018: To end this topic I would say as today, industries are investing a lot in AI-based systems to give a life-like experience to the Users. Here the data is analyzed through various algorithms to let users know about theft, intrusion, fire, incident, or accident.

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