Saturday, November 12, 2016

Product Review: Sighthound


One of the first topic areas that caught my eye was video analytics. As a video surveillance monitor for a lot of my career in physical security, I felt I had a good grasp on why most surveillance systems fail to detect bad guys as much as they should. If you're a physical security professional, you know where that weak link is as well - the monitors. Yup. It took me less than six months looking at video screens most of my day to understand most irregular events fail to go noticed or are properly assessed. This happens for a variety of reasons:
  • Monitor fatigue. This happens when a monitor stares at a screen for too long and either falls asleep or becomes easily distracted. We're humans and no one likes gazing at an empty parking lot for hours on end. So, the mind begins to wonder and bad things can happen. If you'd like to learn more about monitor fatigue, this is a great resource. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue (I know it's Wikipedia but as a primer, it's not too shabby)
  • Monitors are expected to recognize irregular events in a huge ocean of regular benign events. That parking lot I mentioned before could have 400 cars in it and thousands of people coming and going. If mixed in with benign events, irregular events can appear to be okay and fit with the norm. This explains why some folks can get robbed right in front of a camera and no one notice.
  • There are too many "rules" to remember and act upon on too many feeds for a single monitor. Sometimes, with human monitors, too much video is just as bad as driving into someone else's headlights.
Where else are all these problems more demonstrative than in a home security environment? I have friends who have 6 or more cameras on a home and they call themselves "monitoring" those feeds constantly. No, you're not. What I find most often is the direct opposite - they're monitoring one or two cameras, maybe. The others go either unwatched or constantly recording over each other. So what's the solution to ensure all the feeds are being monitored and reporting and recording events as they occur?

Sighthound is a software application that acts as a monitoring platform with an embedded analytics package. You can not only monitor your feeds from various cameras but you can also have those feeds report only when "rules" are broken which include:
  • A person entering a zone.
  • Someone leaving a zone.
  • Motion inside a zone.



The feeds can be viewed remotely. You have to pay for that feature, though, there is a trial version which includes this for 14 days. Given recent issues with Internet of Things being exploited for DDOS attacks, I highly recommend changing whatever default passwords that are on your cameras, ensuring the firewall on your router is working, and updating the firmware on the device. If you can run a scan to see what ports are open on your machine using the scanner at https://iotscanner.bullguard.com and close them, if possible. Also, check out routing the camera through a DNS provider like DynDNS.

I digress. While you can have the software email you or send a notification to the smartphone app, you can also have it do a myriad of options through IFTTT. The possibilities are almost endless from there. Oh and perhaps the most creative option and one I particularly like is the ability to execute a command should an event be triggered. For example, you could set it to send you a snapshot of the event and then shutdown your computer. Why is that cool? If your PC is full-disk encrypted, then you have just ensured a key mitigation piece is activated. You also have a picture or video of the event and can determine if you need to respond further.

What I like most about Sighthound is how quickly it responds to events. Almost 5 or 10 seconds after an event, I received a notification of the event and was able to view a snapshot. That's pretty cool when you consider how costly an enterprise system can be offering the same service.

There are some things I'd like to see it offer in the future:
  • Security options. I'd like to password protect my remote feeds. This maybe here already and I just missed it. If so, I feel like this is kind of an understated feature.
  • More event triggers. It covers the basics but I'd like to see triggers for things noise detection with those cameras that offer audio in their feeds.
  • Possibly some interoperability with other devices. I'd love it if it could network with other sensors through the home and capture those events as well. Some proprietary device systems already do this but I'd like to see something that would allow me to work with events involving a smoke detector and my camera.
Overall, I THOROUGHLY love Sighthound. It has tremendous potential and is extremely affordable. I hope this is a new movement within the home security surveillance sector. I'd like to see less machines that can't or won't cooperate with other devices to successfully mitigate potentially dangerous events. It isn't perfect but I find it is certainly a great step in that direction.

As of now, I haven't reached out to the Sighthound team for an interview. I will soon, though. I'd love to hear what more they have to offer.

If you know of any other physical security applications or devices you'd like me to review, contact me via the "Contact Me" link above.

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