Many communities that have families, especially with children, are implementing ways to prevent homeowners or their guests from speeding in their communities. This is for safety reasons, as well as to gain revenue for Maintenance and Security. Sometimes they have a Security Officer on site which is not enough since they can only report to a police officer. There is also no way to log every vehicle that comes and goes without having multiple officers and a Speed Gun, which is an expensive device ranging from 200$ – 600$ for a good model. This can get pricey especially when there is a need of a Patrol Officer that is Certified to utilize the Speed Gun as well as the Surveillance Equipment on the Patrol Vehicle as well.
I have a solution that will not only gather the Data for you making it automated, but also giving you the ability to use the same surveillance equipment that you currently have (if you have our Network Cameras, Network Video Recorder, Analog or CVI DVRs. It will use the RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) feature on the Devices to get the Video and Data Streams.
Here are the Items I used for this Project:
HardWare:
Software:
* Any other Software that will produce a Virtual Webcam from an RTSP feed will work as well. I used Wirecast because I have used it and it works for this.
*Speed Cam Software can be found here
We first start by Connecting the camera to the PoE Switch. In my case I mounted the camera temporarily onto the side of our TechPro Security Products Building facing a Street that for some reason did not see any traffic on that day so I had to improvise and drive my car through the sensors. Once you have installed the camera properly at a good height and angle you can go onto the next step.
Lets start by Creating the “Virtual Web Camera”. For this I have an application called “ONVIF Device Manager” found here . This software will enable me to make some changes to my camera and capture the RTSP feed string without the need to access the camera via the Internet Explorer Browser.
Once we have the RTSP Feed on the “Live Video” Tab we must ensure that the resolution output is correct for our software. We do this by going to the “Video Streaming” tab and selecting “h.264 1080×720”. After we check this resolution to be correct we will move on to select the Frame Rate to be 30 FPS as well as select the best Quality with the slider.
After this we will move onto WireCast. I have the Pro Version of this application, so all the features are enabled.
We will focus only on creating the virtual webcam. Select the “Source” Tab and click on the “New Web Stream” Option and a new window will appear.
Select RTSP as your Protocol
Click on the “Live Stream” radio button and paste the RTSP Stream String that we had copied from the Onvif Manager Software here. Use CTRL + V to ensure there are no spaces.
Click on the “Connect” button and Save your settings.
Once you have saved the settings, click on the (+) button on the camera feeds/sources. Click on the Camera logo and select the Camera stream in my care its name is “Add Web Stream Source 0 Shot”. This will select the feed.
Double click to select the feed in the mixer and push it out using the –> button.
After all this is done its time to select the Video Output resolution. We do this by selecting the “Output” tab and selecting Virtual Cam Out and a drop down will appear. We will select 1280×720 Resolution and after this click on the “START” button and then we are done with the Virtual Camera settings.
Speed Cam:
Lets first select the camera feed. In my case I am selecting “Wirecast Virtual Camera” and the proper resolution 1280x720p .
Lets move the two sensor feed back panels to the bottom of the screen and after this remove the Privacy Shapes by selecting the “Privacy” tab and turning off or just deleting the shapes. This will clear up the area. If you need to add privacy, just in case there is a house in the way and you do not want that in your Data Feeds, you can do so. It is user friendly; just match the area to block.
After this I move to the “Sensor” Tab. Here I remove one sensor position and configure it properly how I want it on the image and turn around the next sensor so that it will detect on both directions. If the image or lanes are big enough you can add two sensors coming and going for each of the lanes. Keep in mind that the Green Dots are the starting points and the Red Dots are the end point sensors. The middle point will move accordingly.
After we have placed the markers correctly onto the areas to measure we will move on to input the length of the driveway from point to point in meters. For this go to the Distance tab and input the correct figures. You will need to select each lane.
To get a good measurement, use a measuring wheel and mark each spot properly. For this demonstration I used the ruler tool on Google Earth as I did not have the Measuring Wheel Tool with me. Make sure the measurements and resolution on this software is correct. If it is not correct the Data will be incorrect. This software has an accuracy of plus or minus 3%. You can use this tool here to convert Feet to Meters.
We then move to the Radar tab where we can save the data to a folder. In my case I only wanted Radar Photos so I enabled this feature and set the minimum speed to 3km/h which is 1.86mph. After doing all of this I left the software do its thing for a few hours and went back to the software to look at the images it had captured.
The first image is of a Glass Installer’s Company truck. This truck was going approximately 17.64Kmh. I say approximately because this test was not done with accurate measurements although I did a last test where I drove my vehicle in the middle of the sensors and it was 1 Mph off which is pretty accurate since I did not spend the time to get these numbers correct nor the position of the sensors. In the images you can see the Km/h and Mph of each Lane.
Final Testing
When it is all set and done, and all the measurements and mounting of the camera are correct the SpeedCam Software along with our Cameras performed great. I would recommend this setup to any Community trying to deter the Home Owners or their Guests from driving at excess speeds. Safety comes first and we must obey the laws.
Speedcam pro is about to be released in June/July.
It features automatic weather / night time compensation, license plate recognition, USB and IP and video file support and much more. I can’t wait to get a hand on the new software and see how it can be implemented in situations such as this one.
I would like to thank Raser Abwehr for allowing me to use his software and create this article. You can find the SpeedCam Software here , If you wish to purchase the software using their Amazon account please go here and of course any of our Products can be found on Security Camera King.