Smile, you are filmed by a hidden camera!

On duty, I had the opportunity to work closely in the field of various computer-integrated equipment with one large supermarket chain. Slightly smaller than Metro or Wallmart, but also rather big and international. A lot of electronics and jewelry are sold on the shop’s territory, there are departments of “elite goods” - they are serious about safety. For a couple of weeks, I made a good acquaintance with the administrators of their network, and they showed me the holy of holies - the security surveillance room. Strictly speaking, about how, what and why shops of this level are watching their customers and there will be an article.

CCTV room

1) Iron . As a matter of fact, the video surveillance room is more or less predictable - a lot of screens with cameras displayed on them. 42-inch plasma panels are used, each displaying from 4 to 32 pictures. All cameras are recorded over the past few weeks. Yes, it is a lot of terrabytes. Yes, they are there. I will not call the platform in order not to start holivars.

2) People. Regular shift - about 15 people. The person coming in to replace each time to sit on the observation of another (randomly selected) site. This is done for two reasons: first, a person watching 8 hours a day 5 days a week with the same wardrobe / shelf will quickly go crazy (and even earlier he will stop seeing anything on the screen at all). And secondly, the possibility of a security officer agreeing with a friend in the spirit of “I’m watching the electronics department tomorrow, so you can drop in and pull something off, I won’t notice.” In addition to ordinary observation operators, there is a “special response group”, but about it later, when I get to the description of software.
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Cameras

There was a whole series of discoveries for me personally. Not everything is as obvious as it seems at first glance. So in order.
1) Most visible to the naked eye cameras hanging over the racks - fake . This is explained very simply: first, if someone wants to pull something off, the first thing he does is to see if there is a camera in this place. Those. its very existence will already prevent 99% of potential thefts, you do not need to look into it. Well, and secondly, if all the cameras were real, the state would have needed not 100, but 100 people, which would make the whole venture unprofitable. The exception to this rule is the cameras above the entrances and cash registers, they are always real.

2) Most of the real cameras (60% of the total number) are masked. Yes Yes! Forget the hefty cylinders sticking up in sight! See that rack standing at the top of the rack? But these beautiful decorative holes in the wall? But is this a mirror on the corner? And this pipe running across the ceiling? As a matter of fact, it is precisely in these places that you have to smile and wave your hand. :)

3) The cameras themselves are a very serious thing. Zuma, for example, is enough for them to look at the bar-code on the goods in your basket from 30 meters away. The remaining parameters are also on the level. This technique is very different from those in the convenience stores on the corner. It is understandable. Sales volumes are others.

4) In addition to the system of fixed cameras, there is a network of mobile cameras. They are located in special pipes with one-sided mirror (in some places matte or darkened) coating under the ceiling of the store. The cameras are installed on mobile platforms, the movement speed of the platforms is up to 10 m / s, the network covers the entire store. Purpose - in the description of the software.

Soft

The most interesting for me (I think, and for you, the reader) section. Personally, before that I had clearly developed stereotypes that there is no software in such places at all - people are sitting for themselves, staring at monitors, which are directly fed from cameras. As it turned out, this is not the case.

1) All in the figure. Cameras, transmission channels, capture, display. No options.

2) Everything is controlled. This is only in the movie when the monitor is turned off, the guard hits his fist a couple of times and, when the monitor suddenly starts to show again, calms down. :) In reality, the shutdown of any camera, even for a few milliseconds, is a signal for checking the security of the area controlled camera, the camera, the zone in the radius 50 m, all cable channels, cabinets and junction boxes from the camera to the video surveillance servers.

3) Everything is encrypted. Each camera along with the signal sends encrypted control packets with time and camera code. Even if someone succeeds in connecting to the channel imperceptibly, recording a signal for a certain amount of time and sending it back to the channel, an alarm will immediately work, because time is different. The possibility of hacking multi-bit asymmetric keys by quantum computers we agree to ignore, as yet unlikely. :)

4) It uses its own, incredible at first look software. Walk through the functions.
4.1) Counting the number of people who entered / left a day from the store. Again, only in children’s films a child stumbled under the counter will remain in the supermarket for the night.
4.2) Detection of "forgotten" in the store luggage. The fight against terrorism, damn it. Programmatically, having a 3-D card store software looking for new, a certain amount of time, fixed objects.
4.3) Tracking a specific person. The operator simply selects a suspicious type in the picture and the network of cameras itself “leads” it - displays its enlarged picture on a large screen, records its actions. If necessary, the cameras transmit the "object" to each other. Here the network of mobile cameras comes in handy - you can quietly follow the victim to the buyer. You can even watch not for the whole person, but for its individual parts - pockets or hands. Software allows it.
4.4) Customer ranking by “degree of potential danger”. This includes things like speed of movement (a person running around the store is weird, right?), The number of passes past the same place, the number of turns of the head (thieves usually look around many times before hanging something) and much more. The most "dangerous" in the opinion of the software characters are issued on the screens of the "rapid response team" for closer observation.
Actually, here I remembered Ocean with his friends, who fooled casinos video surveillance system. Analysis of pressure, heartbeat, and contraction of the pupils in reality does not come to this point yet, but this does not seem so fantastic to me as when watching a movie. Soon it will be. I do not know, maybe this approach to security may seem a little paranoid to someone, but it gives a reduction of those 3% thefts, common for shops with milder regimes, to the level of 0.1-0.5%. That, when multiplied by sales volumes, pays for the costs of hardware and software many times over.

PS Sorry, the name of the chain of stores or the city will not be. You understand.