Casino Surveillance: Managing Image Retention

All casinos are governed by strict rules when it comes to image retention. The specifics vary by geography – rules in some countries require the footage to be retained for a minimum of six months, while others require images to be kept for just 14 days. In the US, rules change from state to state and, in the case of tribal casinos, by the specific property. Furthermore, requirements can vary within an individual property. In some cases, while ‘general footage’ needs to be kept for 14 days, footage showing credit card swipes must be retained for up to 90 days.

In this blog post, Greg Rogan discusses what to consider when putting the right resiliency measures in place.

Automate your retention requirements

Customisable command and control platforms allow casinos to record, retain and lock down footage for specific time frames, by the individual camera, zone (e.g. a particular gaming table), or universally across the property. By integrating with analytics and utilising an integral rules engine, you can ensure footage that matches specific customer-specified criteria is recorded, stored and retained in line with regulatory demands and in-house protocols. Typical footage will include POS transaction type to wins over a certain monetary threshold or that takes place under ‘incident’ conditions.

Use an evidence locker

During a live incident, surveillance solutions can be programmed to encrypt and transfer pertinent surveillance footage from a primary storage device or edge-recording location to a dedicated ‘evidence locker’. Once there, it can be securely viewed and held for years if necessary but cannot be deleted or recorded over.

Use compression

Another solution to consider is image compression i.e. minimising demand on storage by reducing the size of retained files. Using H.264 compression can reduce file sizes significantly, making it ideally suited to high-volume HD camera environments like casinos. MJPEG and MPEG4 compression techniques are also an option but are typically less suited to gaming environments.

H.265 compression is also now available, largely driven by the development of 4K cameras, but large-scale surveillance users such as casinos need to consider a number of factors before adopting. While promising much in terms of compression without impacting on image quality, the increased processing capabilities needed to introduce issues in terms of ‘live view’ latency and multi-screen monitoring that – for now – may make it unsuitable for some casinos.

Work with the right partner

Properties with large camera counts can generate a lot of video data. With increased adoption of ‘space hungry’ HD IP and 4K cameras, capacity can quickly become an issue for many casinos.

By working with the right partner, they'll take into account your retention requirements and system load to ensure storage is never overwhelmed.