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Camzify
Use case · The cameras themselves

Camera health monitoring

Camera health monitoring is knowing, as it happens, when a camera can no longer see: covered, moved, defocused, frozen or offline. A camera that has gone blind is quiet, which is why it is usually found weeks later, when the footage is needed and is not there. Camzify raises tampering the moment it is confirmed, shows offline cameras and sites as such, and checks every camera's view as an item on the patrol round.

Book a demo Camera tampering detection
  • Tampering in five modes, raised live
  • Offline shown as offline, not as a stale frame
  • Camera view checked on every round
An operator looking at a wall of seven camera views with Camera 03 marked offline
The problem

A blind camera is a quiet camera

Cameras fail slowly and silently. A lens fogs, a bracket drifts, a spider builds across the housing, a branch grows into the view, a feed freezes on a frame from Tuesday. Nothing alarms, because nothing is designed to. The failure is discovered when the footage is needed and the file shows a grey blur or a wall.

Deliberate tampering is faster and worse. A camera covered or turned on the way in is the first move in most intrusions that are planned, and the system it feeds carries on as if the view were fine.

How Camzify handles it

Tampering raised live, view checked on the round

Camera tampering detection watches each feed for five conditions, defocus, lens coverage, sudden scene change, abnormal brightness shift and frozen frames, and raises an alert the moment one is confirmed, because every other detection on that camera is blind until it is fixed. It runs on signal analysis rather than a neural network, so it costs no GPU. Cameras and sites that go offline are shown as such on the live wall and the dashboard, never as a stale picture.

The slow failures are caught by the patrol round: every stop can carry "camera view unobstructed" as an item, judged from the frame, so a drifted bracket or a web across the housing fails a check with a picture of it. Alerts for tampering and offline conditions route on their own category, so they reach whoever maintains the cameras.

Detection

Camera tampering detection

Defocus, coverage, scene change, brightness shift and frozen frames, raised as they happen.

Detection

Motion detection

Pixel-change detection, useful as a liveness signal on a feed that should never be static.

Detection

Zone intrusion detection

The detection that goes blind first when a camera is covered. Worth protecting.

Detection

Line intrusion detection

The same. A tripwire on a camera that cannot see is not a tripwire.

The patrol round

What a camera-health round checks

A camera-health round is every camera on the site, and the checklist is about the camera rather than the scene: view unobstructed, image in focus, scene as expected, feed updating. Run daily, it produces a report that every camera on the site could see at that time, which is the answer to the question an investigator asks first.

For an estate, every site's round reports into one place, and the multi-site console shows which sites have cameras down before anyone drives out.

A check found Not Compliant captures a snapshot and messages the guard designated for that camera; on a manual round the operator chooses to send it, on an automated round it goes on its own. The item stays Pending until it is marked Fixed, which captures the after frame, and the report shows both.

What it will not do

It will not fix the camera or tell you why it failed; it tells you that it did, and shows the frame. It will not diagnose a network outage beyond showing the camera or site offline. It will not detect a camera that was never pointed at the right thing; that is a checklist item for the person who installed it.

We do not publish figures for how quickly tampering is raised or how many blind cameras rounds find. The trust page sets out the policy.

Industries where this applies

Multiple sites Remote sites Property management Retail
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Five conditions: sudden defocus, physical coverage of the lens, a rapid scene change that says the camera was moved or rotated, an abnormal brightness shift, and frozen frames that suggest a looped or stuck feed. Any one of them raises an alert.

A frozen-frame alert fires when the signal is present but the picture stops changing. A camera or site that is offline is a connectivity condition: the live wall shows the camera in a no-signal state rather than a stale frame, and a site with every camera down shows as a site down.

The model is tuned to tell a camera's own automatic exposure and focus adjustments from a sudden, sustained loss of scene detail. A normal dusk transition is not an alert; a lens taped over is.

Every stop can carry the item "camera view unobstructed", judged from the frame. It catches the slow failures tampering detection is not built for: a camera drifting out of alignment, a spider web, a branch that grew into the view, condensation. A round that passes is a record that every camera on it could see at that time.

The dashboard shows cameras online against total and the live wall groups cameras by site with a per-site online count, so the estate is read in one place. Alerts are routed per category, so tampering and offline conditions can go to whoever maintains the cameras rather than to the guard.

Because every other detection on that feed is blind until the camera is fixed, and nobody notices a camera that is quiet. A perimeter with one covered camera is a perimeter with a hole in it, and the hole is usually where the person who covered it came in.

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