Casino Surveillance: Three Ways to Combat Camera Failure

Simply having the right number and type of cameras in exactly the right locations is no guarantee of constant coverage. If a vital camera goes down for whatever reason, even sophisticated failover and redundancy measures may not be enough to guard against coverage loss. In this blog, we look at three ways for casino surveillance operators to consider to reduce camera failure.

Pre-fail indicators

In many cases, factors that indicate imminent camera failure are detectable in advance but only through effective monitoring.

Using SNMP communication protocols, centralised command and control solutions can effectively monitor the health of any integrated device.

Thresholds for unacceptable performance based on the data received can then be alarmed to ensure technical issues can be investigated and remedied by maintenance teams well before the danger of camera failure is realised.

Redundant camera framework

Where specific camera coverage is a high priority due to regulatory demands, another precaution to consider adopting is a redundant camera framework.

Here, presets managed by a surveillance command and control solution automatically reposition ‘back-up’ PTZ cameras to cover vital fields of view should the primary camera feed go down.

Edge recording

Another option to ensure camera coverage, even in the event of connection or network switch failure, is edge recording, i.e. recording to the camera or an integral SD card. The storage capacity of modern SD cards is now large enough that it is possible to record significant timespans of footage using this method. In this scenario, however, it is important to ensure the camera has an alternate power source.

A credible video and security management solution will be able to keep track of any localised edge recording, automatically retrieve the information from its temporary location, and seamlessly restore it to the primary server once any issues have been resolved – a process known as backfilling.