Seeing With or Without Visible Lighting

Written by Theseus Team | Jan 3, 2023 10:59:16 PM

Over the holiday, one of our team members was approached by a large retailer who had been burglarized and "snatch and grabbed" three times in one week in Vermont. The retailer was begging for help, expecting that the thefts would continue until a suspect was apprehended. However, the retailer was struggling with poor indoor lighting, overview cameras with too wide fields of view, and a few other physical and electronic security challenges.

Fortunately, after our review of the video, we found that the person doing the daytime "snatch and grabs" happened to be wearing the same exact shoes as the masked nighttime burglar. When police confronted the suspect with the video footage of the matching shoes and a clear-as-day snapshot of his face in the store, he admitted to all three crimes.

Honestly, the retailer got very lucky because there was only one frame that somewhat clearly showed the matching Adidas shoes in the nighttime IR camera footage. The image on the left below was captured with an indoor IR camera at night in the dark. The image on the right was captured during normal store hours in full lighting.

Now, the organization is taking steps to improve physical and electronic security measures to prevent similar post-incident investigation limitations in the future.

So, with this case in mind, we have a few questions for you:

Have you thought about the difficulty of obtaining usable video evidence when cameras have too wide of a field of view, resulting in low or non-existent resolution (insufficient pixels on target) for identification or recognition purposes?
Have you had an in-depth discussion about DORI and its implications with your current security consultant?
Do you leave interior lights on regardless of time of day in order to capture color images 24x7?
Have you thought about adding or modifying visible lighting to improve outdoor surveillance footage?
Do you rely on infrared illumination (IR lighting) to capture usable video evidence, which ends up being a monochrome image?
Do you work with your architect to match lighting conditions in sensitive areas to appropriate camera model selection?

These are just a few things we discuss with our clients during discovery calls, site surveys, and risk assessments. Perhaps we can help your organization be better prepared as well.

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