4K Security Camera Facial Recognition Testing

Watch this video to see how effective 4K security cameras are for facial recognition at various distances. A series of car burglaries in my neighborhood inspired me to make this video. After showing video surveillance footage recorded by my DVR to the police and to my neighbors, I realized that most people do not have realistic expectations for security cameras. Specifically, the video clarity for facial recognition at distances greater than 25-35 feet away needed to be explained.

Here is the whole story. A few nights ago, three teenaged boys were walking through my neighborhood in South Florida and breaking into cars. My neighbor’s car across the street from my house is one of the vehicles that got broken into. Unfortunately, he does not have a home security camera system. The Palm Beach sheriffs office came to my house the next day and asked me if my security cameras were recording, and if so, to please review the surveillance footage to see if we captured anything usable.

I reviewed the footage and saw the three boys going from house to house. They went to the neighbor’s house to the right of mine and two of the houses across the street. For some reason, they did not come to my house even though my son’s car that was parked outside in my driveway. Maybe they saw the red glow from the IR night vision on my cameras and were deterred. Who knows.

My neighbors car that got broken into across the street was about 100 feet away from the 4K security camera that I have installed on the front of my house, above my garage door.

This is the security camera that was used to record the video. It is a 4K-BL9 bullet 4K security camera that we supply at CCTV Camera Pros.

The 4K-BL9 has a fixed 3.6mm lens, the most typical lens size for home security camera systems.

A 3.6mm lens captures a 90 degree field of view (actually a little wider that 90° on 4K cameras). It does a great job of providing a wide angle view for monitoring my 3 car driveway.

However, it is not designed to capture video for facial recognition at distances greater than 35 feet or so from the where it is installed. You can see this in the video demo.

Please note that to make the above video, I intentionally angled the camera slightly more to the left so that I could have a more straight on angle for the various facial recognition tests. Normally, this camera is angled  more to the right, so that it monitors my entire driveway.

This is the 4K security camera DVR that all of the cameras at my house are connected to. These new hybrid DVRs work with almost all surveillance camera resolutions including D1, 960H, 720p, 1080p, 3mp, 4mp, 5mp, and 8mp / 4K. Analog CCTV (CVBS), AHD, and HD-TVI video formats are supported. This allows customers to use existing lower resolution cameras (including old analog cameras) and upgrade to 4K UHD over time. All BNC video inputs support all resolutions and formats.

Summary

I think that most people will agree that the 4K UHD video resolution captured by my home security camera system is great. However, as you can see in the video that I made, facial recognition is only effective up to about 35 feet with a 4K security camera with a 3.6mm lens. If you have any questions about this video or anything related to video surveillance systems, please email here or call us at CCTV Camera Pros at 1-561-433-8488.