CamID is a system framework including a toolkit for easy and flexible video, audio and I/O signals assignation and routing throughout a video surveillance system. It strongly simplifies the design and programming of any surveillance applications on top of facilitating the maintenance. CamID is delivered with the Euresys Picolo H.264 video capture and compression cards. It is open to any camera and any custom connecting device.

A video surveillance system deals with a multiplicity of hardware devices to transport video, audio and IO signals through the system. This involves often multiple video capture cards, as well as complex connecting devices such as connectors with various pin layouts, cables or patch panels. The signal identification process is tedious and often carried out manually.

CamID offers a standard method to represent the chain of components routing the video, the audio and the IO signals throughout the system. This chain can easily be modified, and each link of this chain can be simply replaced by another one. Moreover, with CamID, each signal can be identified by the same user-provided name throughout the system.

CamID also offers a system configuration tool that contains a collection of components encoded and stored in XML files. The system configuration is described as a hierarchical structure that composes these files into an overall XML-based system description. It is exposed through an intuitive Graphical User Interface, the CamID Editor. For the quick design of installations, CamID provides a predefined library of components including the Euresys Picolo H.264 cards and connecting accessories. Custom components can also be freely created.

The XML files generated during the design phase are simply copied in the duplicated systems. Using CamID principles strongly simplifies the generation of surveillance applications.

Maintenance operations are greatly facilitated as they do not involve complex reconfiguration procedures anymore. The exchange of a cable or a video capture card becomes a simple operation as the reconfiguration of surveillance software is extremely flexible and efficient.

The CamID Editor is an intuitive Web-based tool that performs local or remote editions of CamID installations. With the CamID Editor, it is possible to add, remove, describe and link components in an installation on site. It is also possible to make interactive queries to discover how signals are propagated across a complex maze of physical and software connections. On site, the technician replaces the defective hardware component by another one, available from stock (it could even be a different one) and he performs virtually the same modification in the CamID Editor. A simple update of the XML-based system description suffices.