Alarm Management

Control Center provides audible and visual notification of alarms. These can be generated by devices such as PIRs attached to inputs on the transmitter, by motion, or when video loss is detected.

Control Center contains the following alarm features:

Alarm Actions

When an alarm occurs, users can view video from the associated camera, move to a preset position and acknowledge the alarm. Control Center can also stop video and recording that was started by a different alarm, and start receiving and/or transmitting audio. Relays can be triggered automatically when an alarm occurs, opening a door when a buzzer is pressed, for example.

Alarm Priorities

Alarms from different sources can be prioritized to indicate the order that they should be dealt with. Nine priority levels are supported.

Alarm Procedure

Control Center allows users to view information on how an alarm from a particular source should be dealt with. The Alarm Procedure can be a text file, html file, or the URL of a web page.

Alarm Acknowledgement

Administrators can configure alarms to be manually or automatically acknowledged. The latter option is useful for sites that do not require manual acknowledgement of alarms, but still need to make a permanent record of them to aid review of video footage. When acknowledging alarms manually, users can enter a text response.

Alarm Assignment

In a full, multiple user system, alarms can be assigned to individuals from an unassigned alarm pool. Users can also assign alarms to themselves before acknowledging to avoid duplication of effort and to provide a permanent record of which user dealt with each alarm. They can also return assigned alarms to the unassigned alarm pool.

Email on Alarm

Administrators can use Control Center to configure the system to send email to specified addresses to notify them that an alarm has occurred.

Alarm Reports

Users can create reports about alarms containing the alarm name, date and time, the name of the user who dealt with the alarm and the text entered by this user when acknowledging it. Reports can be saved as Rich Text Format (RTF) and Comma Separated Value (CSV) files, which can be edited in MS Word or MS Excel.

Pre- and Post-alarm Video

Administrators can use Control Center to configure the system to record pre-alarm video and to protect the section of recorded video just before and after an alarm occurred to ensure that it is not deleted.

Integration with Alarm Systems

Control Center can deal with alarms sent from other external alarm systems, such as access control and fire alarm systems. Actions such as displaying video, a map or activating a relay can be automatically performed. Simple binding software must be developed to integrate Control Center with other systems. This can be written using the IndigoVision SDK v1.8.

Alarm Search

When searching for alarms, users can specify the type of alarm they require - this can be Binary, Video Analysis, Video Lost, External Input or Tamper Input. This is useful in conjunction with the alarm count display.

For example, users can search for all Video Analysis alarms and see at a glance the number of times activity was detected in different time periods.

Control Center's Alarm List - click image to enlarge it