CAM-903

Fully covered

The entire frame is a dark, almost black surface, out of focus and softly creased, resting a couple of centimetres from the lens. No street, no people, no horizon: not a single shape can be made out. All that is left of the earlier scene are two threads of light in the top corners, where a little colour leaks past the edge of whatever is in the way. The camera is still transmitting and the disk is still recording: the signal is not missing, the picture is. IRIS sees that the field of view has vanished all at once and that whatever fills it is right against the glass. It does not say what it is, who put it there, or why.

CAM-903 · CAMPO DE VISION · CUBIERTO

What IRIS understands

What it recognises in this scene

lens covered

The rule

You decide once. IRIS applies it always.

a camera loses its field of view all at once and whatever fills the frame is right against the lens

Then

alert the control room with the camera, the time and the video of the seconds before
treat that area as unwatched and say which neighbouring cameras cover it in the meantime
log the time it was covered and the time it was uncovered

The instruction that set it up«Tell me the moment a camera is left seeing nothing, and show me the seconds before it.»

What changes

What changes for whoever answers for the cameras working

Covering a camera is the cheapest way there is to make it useless: a bag, a piece of cardboard, a jacket, three seconds standing on a bin. And it is the slowest to find out about if nobody is in front of the screen, because a black picture makes no sound, does not blink and appears in no error log. It is simply there, dark, among another forty thumbnails, and at three in the morning nobody goes through them one by one. With IRIS the alert goes out while the camera is covered, with the last good image and the seconds before it. That changes the order of things: instead of finding out when somebody asks for the video, somebody can go and look now.

What people usually ask

Isn’t this the same as a camera in the dark at night?

No, and the two are easy to tell apart. A night scene without light still has bright points — street lamps, headlights, shop windows, lit rooms — and it changes when a car goes by. A covered camera has none of that: it is a flat surface, without depth, that does not change even if the whole world walks past. On top of that, the drop happens all at once, not gradually with the sunset. Each of the two cases has its own check and its own alert.

How long does it take to alert?

It alerts while it is happening, not the next day. How long it has to stay covered before the alert goes out is set by you, and it is worth not setting it to zero: a lorry parking in front, a flock of pigeons or a hand wiping the glass block the picture for a few seconds and then go. A few seconds of margin remove almost all of those cases without delaying the alert that actually matters.

Is this going to fill my inbox with alerts?

No, provided it is set up like any other rule. One alert per camera and per episode: while it stays covered nothing repeats, and when it is uncovered the episode closes by itself with its own time. You also decide who each alert reaches and by what route: screen, email, message or the system you already use. A covered camera is a rare event. If you are getting a lot of these alerts, the alerts are not the problem.

Other cameras

The real interface, step by step

Watch what happens. Then watch what IRIS does with it.

Not a recorded video and not a drawing: it is a summary of the real tool, with a different case each time round. The whole tool does not fit in a box.