"average grey" detection as an event

[Sir Rob]

Hi Phil et al

Ive literally just set up ZM on my 1st box and like what I see, Im not totally familiar with all the bells and whistles yet so I hope Im not asking for soemthing thats already in place - forgive me if I do jump the gun.

1st let me say what a class act this piece of software is... well done, Im sure its cost you a lot of blood sweat and tears over the years. I have several question/ideas to throw at you so please bear with me..

1. I know that this is primarily security based sware but its clear that it has serious potential in numerous other applications. My primary need is for regulatory environmental monitoring. I have clients that are reguired as part of their day to day operations to monitor env impacts from their activities, be it smoke from an industrial chimney or dust at the fenceline of a quarry. As the video data generated is needed to be legally defensible in court we need to monitor a site in TLV mode (time lapse video) at regular interval of typically 3 to 6 secs which is not a problem for ZM at all. Events however are an issue.

Motion detn is simlpy not needed at all in this field as monitoring the smoke emissions from the top of a stack will give near constant false data from clouds passing by (horizontally while the smoke is vertical??). What is needed is to define an event simply on its change in contrast ie the avg grey above the top of the stack has gone from white to black.

Is it possible to incorporate this grey as an option? - I do see a completely new direction for ZM in env monitoring - yr software is just right for this.

2. Say that the nieghbor of some industry rings and complains about them, unfortunately no one is able to dial in to the video site to see what is happening till say 1hr later. As the monitor is set up for TLV only and the event has passed the video shows nothing unusual. What is needed is to look back in the jpeg data 1 hr before to see the true history. We need a facility to view this still data not mpeg or streaming...

3. As this data needs to be legally defensible (and I think also this really does apply to the normal security monitoring role for ZM) I need to log user access and what they downloaded and when. All outgoing data needs to md5sum'ed to prove that the false piccy someone else is showing in court is NOT the same as the original downloaded form my monitor your honour.... a bit of ass covering required.... others in the security bus could do well to think this one through.

4. There can be real value from logging a combination of tlv and event driven data from the same video image. This can then be used to continuously compare the event data to the 'known' TLV and even to tune and improve event capture performance - how else do you know what hasnt been logged?

Ive looked at numerous products and honestly this is the one for me, it has so much more potential than anything else Ive seen to date and I would dearly love to be able to use this further in the env field. Certainly my clients are itching to use it and its looking to really stir thngs up here and drag ENV TLV well and truely into the 21st century - finally..

Thanks again phil.. top stuff =:-)