Software Monitors The Quality Of Cameras Feeds And Alert You When The Quality Drops?

I don't believe there is any available that monitors the "quality" of a video feed and alerts based on that data. It sounds like a very difficult item for a camera or VMS to determine. There is software to tell if an image is tampered with (relocated/reoriented/spray-painted/etc) and there is software that will tell if there are communication issues, hard drive failures, etc.

It's not foolproof but you could potentially do this with a network monitoring application like PRTG.

If you know what your average bitrates are during the day, you could monitor the switch ports cameras are connected to and alert when bitrate drops below an acceptable level, maybe 5-10% below average or so.

It's not a guarantee that it will work for every issue when a camera is failing, but most issues will result in image quality degradation, and most of those issues (dimming, smearing, loss of sharpness, etc.) should theoretically reduce bitrate from the camera.

There are other things, like stuck cut filters, garbled images, etc., it might not detect, but I would think those are less common.

We use our IT teams Orion software to monitor our IP cameras and have alerts set up based on traffic. Basically though we found that the only valid accurate alert we get is when traffic is zero. Here is a screenshot of what our monitoring looks like with the first couple items shown.

The alerts we have set up are on another screen, but basically it emails/texts a couple of us when a camera goes silent. I am guessing if I really spent the time I could fine tune it to determine what "normal" traffic is, but I would have determine that by each camera and the variables (location, holidays, weekends, nights, etc.) would be a nightmare to keep accurate. Plus things change in an area and I would have to do the work all over again. Be a pain.

http://www.viakoo.com/viakoo-why/#bepreemptive

It will be very difficult to fond software that does this. just using the tamper settings in my vms, it makes alot of false alerts and its more trouble than its worth.

I would make a guestimate that every one year you just need to refocus the varifocal cameras as that is the trend im seeing with my cameras

What VMS/NVR are you using? Shouldn't this be integrated with your system? I know that even the cheapest Dahua and Hikvision NVRs have alarms for all types of failures. Maybe not exactly "hey your camera will die in two days" type of thing, but they can reactively tell you it is down. Even the low end of VMS systems also have alarms and reporting built in too.

Some feedback from Milestone:

Both XProtect Expert and Corporate offers the system monitor, and it can monitor the cameras live and recording framerate as well as communication issues – but not quality as such.

That said – we have many more (debug) counters that can be monitored by running perfmon.exe on the server (or Microsoft SCOM, or other 3^rd party tools)

For instance the Bytes/sec below show the bitrate for the camera and it could (sort-of) be monitored to evaluate the quality of the video. However – just monitoring the bitrate to evaluate the quality of the video could be difficult if the bitrate is variable… and even if fixed the bitrate could be ok, and the image bad because of a bad sensor or something else….

(One note – I am 99% sure the Bytes/sec is per camera – total for all active streams on the camera. )

The best option would probably be to purchase some sort of image quality analytics tool, but I don’t have an overview of the solutions our partners have made or what can be purchased in general.

Some cameras have a lot of information exposed over SNMP and monitoring this over time with historical graphical representation if you have access to things like memory usage (allocation and release), CPU usage, historical bitrate, FPS rendered verses time to render, etc; you can get to a point where you can predict a crash or trace bugs in the firmware.

In a previous company we used the SNMP tools for this purpose with long term monitoring for bug finding along with lots of engineering debug which was also exposed on the product.