Handling the Spec Game
Posted by Ian Radziejewski
The detective peers intently over the computer expert’s shoulder. A blurry figure drifts across the LCD screen in slow motion. “Stop!” exclaims the officer. “Now back it up a few frames…stop right there.” The image is frozen at the precise moment that the suspect is looking into the camera.
The face is unrecognizable, half hidden in shadow, and only a small part of a wide-angle image that captures an entire room. “Can you zoom in and enhance that for me?” the officer asks confidently. In an instant, the once obscure face enlarges to fill the screen and fills out with all the detail your HDTV can handle.
This scene is familiar to almost everyone, repeated nightly in scores of hit TV police dramas and countless movies. Yet the line between fact and fiction is just as blurry as that first image of the suspect. While there continue to be tremendous advances in all areas of surveillance technology, the kind of ‘enhancement’ portrayed in these dramas is often well beyond the capabilities of most video surveillance systems available today.
Although these depictions may create unrealistic expectations amongst the general public, you can be sure that security professionals do not generally rely on TV to get information about the latest systems. However, there is a similar problem that is potentially much more harmful to the industry, and that is the ‘spec game.’ Also known as ‘specmanship,’ this practice is usually initiated by vendors who are looking for some way to differentiate their product offering.
The big problem with the spec game is that it can create unrealistic expectations just as a TV show does. By focusing on only particular specifications of a system, a marketing document can gloss over all the other requirements needed to achieve the expected system performance. For example, a lot of attention is paid to ‘resolution’ in a video system. However, often the specifications will only refer to the recording device, without considering the cameras that are the source of the video image. If you have a low-resolution camera, then a high-resolution video recorder is wasted. Even worse are marketing pieces that are too vague; you may think that ‘high-definition resolution’ refers to the entire system when in fact it is only one element.
The unavoidable answer to this problem is that you have to do your homework. You need to familiarize yourself with the various product offerings and the meaning behind all that jargon. You may choose to enlist the help of an independent consultant, particularly if you have a larger or more complex system.
In all cases, always make sure you have a chance to evaluate the equipment in a real transit installation. If you can’t recognize the faces of passengers on the bus, don’t count on some computer magic to transform the images. When it comes to video images, you can trust your eyes to tell you if the quality is good enough. In this case, truly seeing is believing.
Ian Radziejewski is president of Seon Design Inc.