Cisco Video Surveilance Operations Manager Overview

Here is a quick overview of Cisco's Video Surveillance Operations Manager:

The new server box comes with a 192.168.0.x address. After assigned a valid IP and reconnected to network, here is the login page:

Logging in and here is the first server:

Click on the "Console" section - the Cisco icon, to configure SNMP, SMTP, and other server related settings. One thing we did is adding camera driver through "Manage Drivers":

After downloading the new camera driver (zip file) from Cisco.com download section, click on "Browse..." button to select the zip file and upload:

If you are using non-supported camera, you have an option to install a encoder to pass the camera feed to this server:

From here, you can add analog cameras:



Click on "IP/Network Cameras" to add new IP cam. You will need to assign a name, IP, PTZ feature to the camera. If the camera is in the supported list, you should see the Preview right away. If the camera is not in the supported list or the Preview is black, you will need to add the driver in the previous steps. Here is an example of Cisco 2621V cam:

If the camera you added support PTZ feature, you can find the cam and further configure the feature here:

The camera has to support PTZ feature. Here is Cisco 2900 Series IP Camera made by Pelco:

To define Preset - predefined camera shot position, click "PTZ Config" from above window. Then in the next window, enter a label name and adjust camera angle to an area of interest and click "Set Preset". Create a few preset sets and click on Test button. You will see the camera will automatically change position to those predefined point. You can create about 100 presets. Once finish define the presets, click "Finished" button to save:

Now if you click on the "OPs" button on the top of left hand menu bar, you can select the camera and select the joystick icon near bottom, and click on "Choose Presets" to change camera angle as show here:

 

If you have wall of monitors, you can configure Monitors by going back to "Admin" view and select "Monitors":

You can manage a group of cameras by creating camera group - select "Drag-and-Drop Camera Groups":

To create new group, click "Group", "Add Group":

Here are a few groups:

After cameras were added to the system, you will need to create "Camera Feeds" to define storage server, stream type, F/B rate, etc.

Here are some details of a feed:

If you have defined groups in the previous steps, you can associate the feed to camera group:

If you have defined Users and Roles in advance, which will be shown later, you can assign rights to the role (user group) to define who can view the camera feed. In our case, we created "93SchoolAdmin" role for site 93 and the users in the role can only view video feeds in 93CamGroup. Another similar role, "94Admin", belong to another site, and users in this role will NOT be able to view video feeds in site 93. "Administrator" role is for system administrators. Users in this role can manage this video feed. "CentralSecurity" role is for central office security officer. Users in this role can view all the video feeds. "SRO" is for on site police officers. If site 94 is a sub-site of 93, the users in SRO role can view both 93 and 94 site's video feeds. Ignore rest of the roles and they are just test roles.



Here is an example of how to manage bulk of cameras:

Here you can define video archives to record video onto server. You can select camera/video feed, schedule, backup option, assign rights who can view this achieve...

Views are for users in each role. When users in a role log into the server, they will be presented a default view, in which you can define how many camera can be viewed and the arrangement of those camera view. Here are some of the feature you can define in a view:

• layout of the view
• fixed windows, which are pinned camera feed in the view
• view name, for assignment purpose
• video feeds in the view

Here are Users and Roles I have described previously:



You can set up Event in the system, such as movement detection in certain area of a camera feed. If camera detect the movement in the defined area, the system will create an event and user can click on the event in the camera view window to play the event. In our case, we set up an event to detect movement in the main entrance area camera feed, door area. Every time someone passing the door, the system create a Start and an End event. If click on the start event, system will play a segment of the video of someone passing the area. You can define setup rights and history rights of the event:

You can define system related settings here:

In the previous screen shots, we are working in the Admin Windows and you can see "Ops" in the top right hand side. If you click on the "Ops", we will enter operation view. Here you can see all the predefined views, camera feeds, and video archives.

You can view the smaller feed by click the blank area and select a particular smaller feed. There are different icons at the bottom of the windows to allow you see the archive or events of the that feed:

Here are camera related settings. Similar to the server, you need to log on to the camera with default user name and password and change the default 192.168.0.x address. You will need to do this on each IP cam before you adding cam in the server.