On almost every weekend over the course of several weeks, vandals smashed windows at Hillsdale Public School in Oshawa, Ont. Workers would replace the windows only for the vandals break them again.
Teacher Brian Farrugia thought there had to be a technological solution. He tooled around the Internet and came across a beta version of free video security software called Vitamin D. He downloaded it and tried it at home.
“And it worked perfectly,” Mr. Farrugia said. “I was really impressed with it.”
He approached his principal, Nick Palumbo, who approved spending about $90 to buy a couple of webcams to try the software at the school. That weekend, the vandals returned – only this time, a camera captured their movements, which triggered a Vitamin D alert that was sent by text message to Mr. Farrugia and his principal. When they checked computers on Monday morning, they identified the vandals, who happened to be former students.
“We had the culprits arrested and we haven’t had a problem since,” Mr. Farrugia said.
His experience so pleased Vitamin D that the company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., posted Mr. Farrugia’s testimonial on its website. Vitamin D even offered him a full version of the software, although he hasn’t taken the company up because the free version worked so well.
That freebie has been extremely popular, said Vitamin D spokesperson Celeste Baranski. Maybe too popular. About 100,000 copies have been downloaded. More advanced versions sell for $49 and $199 (U.S.), but they account for only about one per cent of Vitamin D downloads.
Shortly after launching in February this year, Ms. Baranski and her partners dissolved Vitamin D Inc. because they did not get enough venture capital to pay their salaries full time. However, they transferred ownership of the software to a limited liability corporation, called Vitamin D Video, which the partners are now running in their spare time.
“So we’ve all gotten other jobs and we’re continuing to sell and support the app on the website,” Ms. Baranski said.
Vitamin D is one of many companies selling video surveillance software over the Internet. Another is Aimetis Corporation, of Waterloo, Ont. Founded in 2003 by Justin Schorn and Mike Janzen, Aimetis has grown to about 50 employees with international offices in Frankfurt and Shanghai as well as close to 500 retail partners in about 100 countries, said CEO Marc Holtenhoff.
“One reason that people spend money for video is that when something bad happens they want to go back through the data and look for information,” Mr. Holtenhoff said. “But if you have lots of cameras and you store, let’s say, 30 days of footage, and you need to find that one event that was interesting, it’s very tedious to manually review video.”
Video surveillance software filters through that chaff by identifying interesting snippets. Judging from video tutorials on their respective websites, the Aimetis and Vitamin D programs share many similar features, such as rules for when to record events. For example, they both enable the user to mark off which areas in a camera’s view are to be ignored. They are also able to ignore most irrelevant or distracting movements, such as wind, fluttering leaves, or clouds.
That isn’t to say the algorithms are perfect. Ms. Baranski said Vitamin D errors tend to be false positives, such as mistaking a dog for a person. Mr. Holtenhoff said Aimetis has been refined to reduce false positives by ignoring background information like rain and shadows.
