What Benefits We Can Get from Multi-sensor Camera More Than Fisheye and VR Camera?

Before we answer this question, I would like to bring up a term - Situational awareness. Situational awareness is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space(1), In CCTV industry, it means you can learn the whole story in the real-time monitoring and footage playback instead of many discrete video spot.

Situational awareness is such important in video surveillance. Image you are driving the car on the road, holding high situational awareness allows you not only focusing on other cars around but also knowing the surrounding situations such as barrier at rail crossing, passers-by who might crush into your drive way in a sudden. Raising situational awareness is beneficial for the instant react to dangers and threats. It is also playing an important role in identifying criminal behavior in the investigations. Even after criminals occur, offering integral evidence is more efficient in restoring the event for forensics.

Multi-sensor camera is the camera with several sensors built-in. It can increases situational awareness dramatically with its flexible wide area coverage and high pixel density. Let's take a simple test, close one of your eyes and look around, you will find your awareness drop down sharply. It is because you lost part of your vision with single eye. Multi-sensor camera can generate the surrounding video by putting several sensors together. The pixel density is another critical element. It tells how much pixel per meter (PPM). Similar as flood control with sandbags on the dam. The more sandbag, the more strong the dam can stand the flood, here it is more detail the image can deliver. Multi sensor maintain high pixel density and it doesn't compromise the image quality to generate continuous video of the sense.

(image via Arecont Vision)

You may ask why not fisheye or VR camera, it does cover 360 degree with no blind spot. However, the fisheye or VR camera allocates the limited pixel to the whole 360 degree area which make the density very low. It is proper solution for monitoring the general activities around specific area. The PTZ camera is the opposite case, you are able to receive extremely high pixel density image when the camera zoom in, think of you can put all 2-megapixel to a small gate. The problem is you always need to take the risk of missing incident occurred on one place when the camera is pointing another.

There are different designs of multi sensor camera. Some cameras allow user to configure the shooting direction even change the lens, such as ArecontVision, GOLBONG. The user can manually configures the sensors to view 180/270/360 degree. Some have PTZ camera built-in plus 360 degree view, the coverage and shooting direction is not configurable, such as Axis, Vivotek. The operator can select the area from the panoramic image and the PTZ camera will zoom in automatically. One of the practical issue is how to record the multi-sensor camera. Once you have deployed several multi-sensor cameras on the field, the recording system is pretty headache. You need powerful PC plus VMS software. The simple solution will be connecting those multi-sensor cameras to conventional NVR which allow you to quickly setup the system and impress your customer with continuous video of the sense. The motion recording on the NVR even can save a lot of search time to find the interested footages.

Multi-sensor camera can deliver the situational awareness enhancement video and bring great ROI to the users.
References:
(1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness