Oncam Grandeye Pioneers Award-Winning 360º CCTV Technology

Oncam Grandeye Pioneers Award-Winning 360º CCTV Technology

UK-based Oncam Grandeye is the developer of an award-winning 360º CCTV video security product, which has made them a true pioneer in the industry. And it’s powered by a surveillance-optimized hard drive — the Seagate SkyHawk.

Oncam has a technology that uses 3D dewarping. It can view images in 360-degrees in real-life proportions just as the human eye sees it. It’s the only technology in world that can do this. The company says that by enabling high-resolution recording of the entire fisheye view — independent of what an operator is doing — images can be processed during playback as if they were live images. During playback, images can be dewarped and virtual cameras can be generated — enabling the viewer to pan, tilt and zoom around the entire scene.

As a result, the benefits to a security team in the field include:

  • a wider area of coverage with no blind spots;
  • 100% coverage live and on playback;
  • camera cannot be left looking in the wrong direction;
  • no moving parts required, no maintenance required;
  • completely silent operation

The Oncam Halocorder was first introduced as part of Grandeye’s Professional Analog Series and has a growing customer base across a number of sectors: warehousing, retail, banking, leisure, prisons, public transport hubs, corporate facilities, industrial facilities and the military.

Almost as Good as Being There

“With all other recording solutions on the market, you are limited to the pan, tilt and zoom settings of the camera at the time the video was committed to the recorder,” explains Bryan Waters, a senior product specialist at Grandeye.

“The Seagate hard drive enables our system to capture high-resolution 360º video which can then be played back through our camera for retrospective analysis. This analysis enables retrospective ePTZ, which means that security professionals can effectively point the camera where they were not looking at the time of an incident.”

The design team chose Seagate’s optimized SkyHawk hard drives to power this revolutionary new product.

Mammoth Capacities Drive Simultaneous Read/Write

Grandeye needed a hard drive capable of having very large amounts of data continually written to it, even during playback. SkyHawk is optimized to enable the reading and writing of large files to and from different parts of the disk on a near simultaneous basis.

“By having a large storage capacity, we are able to offer about five days of continuous 24×7 high-resolution video recording at a frame rate of 4fps. This can be optimized by configuring recording to take place at lower frame rates, lower quality, on a scheduled basis or only in response to motion or other alarms being detected.

“Our retrospective capability, by virtue of the fact that our recorded data is at high resolution, means that operators can achieve the equivalent of 7× optical zoom after the fact,” Waters continues.

Keeping a Close Eye on Service and Support

Seagate leadership in the hard drive industry was clearly critical to Grandeye, according to Waters.

“We were looking for products which were server-quality, with AV applications in mind, and Seagate has proved to be a market leader in developing this kind of technology. We found that Seagate had the right technical specifications for our requirements, the best match for price, performance and storage capacity.”

But Waters said the service and support Grandeye has enjoyed since choosing to integrate Seagate drives has also clearly been a massive boon:

“We found that the pre-sales and after-sales technical support has been excellent, and we’re very happy with our relationship with the distributor — as well as the support Seagate is offering the distributor, which we consider to be extremely important.”

Why Customers Buy From Grandeye

Currently, Grandeye operates an OEM business model, with products sold to third-party manufacturers and distributors who brand and market them. Some of these third parties are straight manufacturing companies who have their own distribution and reseller network. Others are resellers and system integrators who sell complete solutions.

The benefits enjoyed are the same for all: reduced camera count, simple integration and the peace of mind of knowing that the camera and recorder combination is capturing everything that takes place, independent of the operator.

2019-11-27T14:54:30+00:00

About the Author:

Jessica Burton
Jessica Burton is a global product marketing manager at Seagate.