Facial recognition and camera lighting

[actruck]

Unfortunately, I just had a case of someone walking around our RV site with a hand held device. I have 4 cameras and all 4 picked up on him at various stages of his presence. Only problem is it was around 5:30 in the evening so the lighting wasn’t the best. I can see enough of him that I feel confident who it is and I plan to have a chat with him to see if it was him or not. Our site is not one that you would just “go for a walk” in the area and end up there. He was there with a purpose especially when he was within 3 feet of the rv on all four sides carrying a hand held device out in front of him. The last camera caught him actually looking up at it. I’m sure he didn’t know they were there.

Is there some kind of small light I can install to assist with the camera night vision?

The cameras I'm using are listed below and install locations are from 15ft to 30ft from the pole to the ground.

Hikvision DS-2CD2032F-I 1/3" CMOS 3MP IR Fixed Focal Lens Bullet Camera HD Waterproof Cctv Network Security Camera System POE IP Night Vision Camera 4MM with Build-in SD Card Slot

 

[Del Boy]

An IR illuminator would help. So would lighting up the area with normal light.

 

[LittleBrother]

$30 for a standard house light that, on movement, blasts out 2 X 100 W halogens. Just be sure to test the response time of your camera; either leave it on day at all times or be sure that when it is set to night and the extra light comes on it isn't blinded for long.

 

[Q™]

$30 for a standard house light that, on movement, blasts out 2 X 100 W halogens. Just be sure to test the response time of your camera; either leave it on day at all times or be sure that when it is set to night and the extra light comes on it isn't blinded for long.

I've been using dual (100w equivalent) outdoor-rated LED floodlights that I purchased at Costco. They work great, instant-on and they don't draw a lot of current. A+++ IMO.

 

[MartyO]

could have been trying to access your wifi , or looking for leftovers
.

 

[SyconsciousAu]

Remember that lighting is only one part of the puzzle. Make sure your pixel density is high enough was well. 352ppm is the Australian Standard. Enough light for a shutter speed high enough to eliminate motion blur will improve you chances of recognition too.

 

[actruck]

could have been trying to access your wifi , or looking for leftovers
.

I'm thinking Wi-Fi as well. His site is maybe 1000 yards away so my Wi-Fi connection wouldn't do him any good unless he was trying to access something on my network. The part of the campground we are in is closed for the season. If it’s who I think it is, he has a permanent site in another part of the campground. I still see no reason for him to be this close without a reason.

I will look at additional motion controlled lighting.

 

[actruck]

An IR illuminator would help. So would lighting up the area with normal light.

Any IR illuminator in particular you would recommend?

 

[actruck]

Remember that lighting is only one part of the puzzle. Make sure your pixel density is high enough was well. 352ppm is the Australian Standard. Enough light for a shutter speed high enough to eliminate motion blur will improve you chances of recognition too.

You lost me on this one. Are there settings I should be looking at to improve the image quality with the additional lighting?

 

[SyconsciousAu]

Pixel density is a function of your lens and sensor. There are various lens calculators which will give you the approximate pixel density for a given camera and lens combination.

You will find shutter speed in your video menu. It will be either expressed as a fraction of a second, or in milliseconds. This sets the maximum amount of time that each frame will be exposed for. By lengthening the exposure each frame captures more light and appears brighter. The problem is that anything that moves during this period will blur. The shorter the period the less blur but the darker your image is and vice versa. The second setting you have to help at night is gain, which translates to ISO in Digital still photography. Basically you are increasing the camera's sensitivity to light, at the cost of noise or grain in your image.

Now if you have enough light you can run both high shutter speed and low gain for a nice clean image with no motion blur. This is what you get by day. Lighting the place up like daytime at night is both expensive and tends to annoy the neighbours. IR illuminates your night image without annoying the neighbours but point sources do not illuminate evenly, unless you shell out for very expensive Derwent illuminators. Some objects in the field will reflect more light back to the camera than others. As a result you now have some areas of the image that are brighter than other areas, and the near parts of the image are brighter than the far distance. If you try to illuminate that whole field from a point source near the camera you will now find that you have too much light in the foreground and everything is over exposed, or if you adjust your setting to insure the foreground isn't over exposed, the background disappears into darkness. You are aiming to have lighting as even as you can across the entire scene you want to capture. Unless you are shooting inside a movie lot this is never going to happen for most of us with limited budgets. What you can try to do is use the wide dynamic range on the camera to even out the lighting in the scene however too much wide dynamic range can make your image less sharp, or cause ghosting.

An acceptable image requires you to juggle all of these things in your specific scenario. There are no magic one size fits all solutions. You have to test and experiment.