City upgraded to LED street lights

[Parley]

IMHO the starlights and better cameras do not need as much light. I am thinking the "right" kind of light would help things a lot. That is what I am trying to find out. Which "type" of light is best for our IP cameras.

 

[CCTVCam]

One thing I omitted to mention, although I've never seen it quoted with floodlights, just LED bulbs, is the CRI (colour rating index (0-100)). The higher this is, the closer the light is to daylight. Over 80 is generally considered acceptable but anything in the 90's is good. Again you're at the mercy of the manufacturers for accuracy, although the lack of CRI's for most products seems to suggest that atm, it tends to be the better quality ones who quote them.

One suggestion made above you could try is having an LED bulb on all night. Personally, to keep light pollution and costs down, I'd be tempted to try a lower power dusk to dawn light with a second reinforcement light on a sensor. This is the arrangement I have in my backyard, albeit again I'm not using CCTV and don't know how much the shift in brightness would affect it, although here you're not going from full dark to light, just light to lighter.

My arrangement is a universal wall light with a daylight LED bulb on a separate dawn to dusk sensor. Reinforcing that I then have 2 LED floodlights connected to a PIR sensor that come on when movement is detected. I have 2 floods simply to give better coverage because I want light along the garage side as well as the house wall, with the side spill from both lighting the garden, but there's no reason why it couldn't be 1 dawn to dusk and 1 flood in principle. You just need to ensure the dawn to dusk sensor is placed outside of any light spill and obviously the same with the floodlight PIR (as the light from the dawn to dusk fitting can stop it switching on).

This is my arrangement, but as I said, it's not being used with CCTV, so I leave those with specific experience to comment on it's suitability for application to CCTV (my dusk to dawn is actually quite a low wattage bulb as I'm not after huge amounts of permanent light (5 watts). Obviously with CCTV you'd probably want a more powerful base light to start with). It probably also appears darker in the still photo than it actually is in reality, as the floods caused the stills camera I used to under exposed when it's pointing at them. However, note, I haven't gone for a very bright solution,as it's more than adequate for my non CCTV needs as an overly bright security light without CCTV can actually dazzle neighbours and make it harder to see what's happening:





It's hard for me to make recommendations without specific CCTV experience with these lights but I'd probably try at least a 10W (@860 lumen) as dusk to dawn base light and a 50W flood on the PIR as a starting point if experimenting in this way. This should give you 860 lumen as a background light and around 4,000 lumens as the reinforcement. LED bulbs are cheap for the dusk to dawn light for experimentation, although it's hard to find much over 860 lumen in my experience as there's not much demand for very high lumen ES style bulbs as these are usually used indoors. I have seen some 12W at around 1,200 lumen, if you want a higher background starting point. Just make sure the fitting can take the LED rating as it's often much lower than for incandescent lamps.

The light that gets expensive to experiment with is the high watt LED security flood lighting, as these aren't cheap especially over 50W. However, I'm sure others on here will have tried various wattages / solutions before and with CCTV so be able to give more specific advice on the reinforcement level and how well a background / reinforcement combo works with the cameras adjustments.

 

[J Sigmo]

IMHO the starlights and better cameras do not need as much light. I am thinking the "right" kind of light would help things a lot. That is what I am trying to find out. Which "type" of light is best for our IP cameras.

And this is far from trivial to figure out. Just like a digital photo camera, these security cameras use sensors that consist of arrays of photodetectors that incorporate color filters ahead of the individual sensors. Most use a Bayer filter arrangement.

To create a color bitmap from the information the array produces requires software to interpret the data. And thus gets us into a subtle area of image processing that photographers deal with when shooting and then processing their photos. Initially, what the image sensor and analog-to-digital converters produce, as the sensor is "read out", is a file containing the "RAW" voltage readings from each of the millions of individual sensors in the array. Some have a red filter, some have a green filter, and some have a blue filter. The camera's internal firmware performs the "de-Bayering" and color balance adjustments on that "RAW" image data. The result is a color bitmap file. The "RAW" data is then discarded.

You'll notice that most cameras have settings for different ways to calculate white balance when performing the de-bayering calculations. Usually there are several manual presets, such as "daylight", "incandescent", etc., and then an "auto" setting.

For our security cameras, you might think that, as with casual photography, we simply want to get the most natural-looking colors with the least hassle.

But what you find when shooting more critical photo situations is that you cannot always predict the future. So choosing a processing preset is difficult or impossible. And as with shooting still photos using "JPG-Only" mode in a still photo camera, our security cameras are discarding the RAW image data, and we cannot go back in time and recover that data.

And because selecting a color balance preset, or using auto-white-balance requires applying non-linear adjustments to the RAW image data, we can end up with "clipping" or "zeroing out" of image data that wasn't clipped or zero in the RAW data captured by the camera's sensor. The result is that our color balance selection, in the camera settings, can reduce the dynamic range and lose details that the sensor itself actually captured. But again, that RAW data gets discarded, so we cannot go back and reprocess it with different color balance settings to recover that lost image data.

Many still photo cameras have the option to store the RAW image data so you can play with the processing settings after the fact, and get exactly what you want from each shot. And some video cameras offer different recording modes that use different tone curves, etc., that may provide better dynamic range.

But the security cameras I've played with don't offer anything like that. So we need to be careful when choosing the color processing settings. Settings (and lighting) that gives "off" colors may actually be preserving more dynamic range, and prove more valuable than lighting and white-balance combinations that produce more "pleasing" colors.

So, again, this is far from trivial. And what seems best to the eye, at first, may not really be capturing the most detail.

To get the exposure histograms that a still camera displays to better match what the sensor is actually capturing in the RAW files, some of us will adjust the in-camera JPG processing settings to optimize the histograms. And this results in the camera producing dull, bland, useless in-camera JPGs. But our RAW files are more accurately exposed because the exposure histograms, which are, annoyingly, always based on the in-camera JPG processing, end up better matching what the sensor is actually capturing.

One wonders if some similar tricks could be used to get bland, but higher dynamic range images from our security cameras when setting up lighting and camera settings. And if so, could we accept looking at the off-colors and bland dynamics for the sake of capturing the most detail. And would it be even better to have truly monochrome image sensors in these cameras, and give up color altogether.

Doing some research on the subject I came across this article. Looks like they are talking 400-700nm white light led's.

https://www.axis.com/files/feature_articles/ar_axis_raytec_summary_47904_en_1206_lo.pdf

That's a very interesting document. I need to read it all. But on quickly scanning it, I just want to say that if possible, I would place the external illuminators fairly far from the cameras to reduce the effect of brightly lighting bugs, snow, rain, etc., right near the camera. I know this would be difficult in a pole-mount situation.

 

[Parley]

My neighbor added an LED light to the front on his house by the garage. It sure helped with the lighting on my cars and his driveway. In fact two cameras now stay in color all night. I have a total of 3 cameras that cover the cars in my driveway. I think that anyone approaching my cars will be easier to identify now. The negative is that you cannot see as well into the foliage across the street as you could when it was all black and white. Otherwise it is a positive IMHO.

 

[Parley]

Here is a picture of the next car over. I need to look into my security lighting which is just to the right of this picture. I think I can make some improvements.

 

[Parley]

I looked at my security lights today. They both have PAR38 Halogen bulbs. So I switched over to 90W 1000 lumen LED PAR38 bulbs. They had a choice of bright light or daylight. I went with the daylight. We shall see tonight how it works out. By the way all three of the front cameras guarding the cars are Dahua IPC-HFW8232E-Z cameras. They have the 1/1.9" sensors.

 

[Parley]

Here is a picture of the 1000 lumen LED security light. It looks like I could cut it down to maybe 750 or so lumens. The white daylight color of the LED looks pretty good. I may play around with this some more. By the way this camera now stays in full color all night.

 

[bickford]

for night in color mode you use anti flicker 50/60 Hz ?
BICK

 

[Parley]

I believe it is 50hz. By the way I will probably be leaving this alone. The cost of the LED bulbs to go lower on the lumens goes up quite a bit. My wife's car parks to the left in the picture but she is out for a few hours.

 

[Parley]

Here is a picture of raindrops with the new LED lighting.

 

[CCTVCam]

I looked at my security lights today. They both have PAR38 Halogen bulbs. So I switched over to 90W 1000 lumen LED PAR38 bulbs.

That's a lot of wattage. LED should be far lower. 1000 lumen is achieveable with around 8-10W in LED, a saving of 82 watts!

I believe it is 50hz. By the way I will probably be leaving this alone. The cost of the LED bulbs to go lower on the lumens goes up quite a bit. My wife's car parks to the left in the picture but she is out for a few hours.

Must be different to the UK then: Wilko LED Bulb Filament Classic ES 7W Daylight | Wilko

Personally I find these "daylight" bulbs excellent for visual colour. However, not tested with CCTV.

That's about $6 for an 860 lumen 7W. Of course if your talking LED PAR's then might be more expensive.

 

[Parley]

You are right. That is 90 Watt equivalent. The actual wattage used is 11.1.