Camera Configuration

Configure the connection to your camera

SWARM offers Multi-Camera support, allowing you to process more than one camera per Perception Box.

Perception Box Management

To open the configuration page of a Perception Box, click on the row of the Box. There you can manage all cameras running on one device.

Although you are completely free in naming your Perception Boxes, you might want to have a logical naming scheme.

Configuration Overview - Configuration

Configuration Overview - Device Health

Mark	Description
1	Device information By clicking on the pen you may change the name of the Perception Box. There are nearly no limitations to doing so. You may use any special character and as many chars as you want. On top, you find the Device ID and the Serial number of the device with a copy option. The device ID is necessary for any support case you are opening. The serial number is the one from the Perception box which you find on the label of the box
2	Here you can see the individual naming of each camera on one device, which can be changed in the next steps where you are configuring the camera settings. By clicking on the row of the camera the camera settings will open.
3	Add Camera In the configuration step of your Perception Box you might need to add new cameras which can be achieved by clicking on this button.
4	Retrieve Logs & Reboot Device On top, you have the options to retrieve and display the SWARM software logs to get a more detailed overview in case the box is not running as expected. There you can see if the box is able to connect to the camera. In case the connection to the camera is not successful, please check the camera & network settings on your side. As every hardware needs a reboot from time to time, we included this function "Reboot device" here to do this. In case you still experience issues, please contact our support team.
5	The Camera Status represents basic monitoring of SWARM software and gives an indication if the software, camera input and the MQTT connection is up and running on camera level. See the definition of the status in the Camera and Device Monitoring page.

Depending on your subscription, you will have a pre-defined number of cameras you may use with your Perception Box. If you need to process more cameras, contact our Sales team.

The maximum number of cameras you can use depends on your hardware. While our SWARM Perception Box does have a fixed number of cameras, we did tests and benchmarks for recommended hardware.

Camera settings

Clicking on a camera will collapse the corresponding settings. You can name the camera. On top you have the option to deactivate the camera stream. If a stream is deactivated it will not be taken into consideration by the SWARM Software and the performance will not be impacted but the configuration will be kept.

A GPS coordinate needs to be set for each camera. The GPS coordinate is mandatory and can by entering the coordinates or with the location picker directly on the map.

Camera configuration options

Location picker for camera

We are currently able to process camera streams over RTSP, as well as streams coming over USB. You can select the different options as Connection Type.

• RTSP cameras must be configured with H264 or H264+ video codec. For more details, head over to Solution areas

• USB cameras must be available as V4L device at /dev/video0. The following specifications are supported:

  • RAW color format: UYVY, YUY2, YVYU

  • Resolution: 1080p

  • Other camera settings:

    • Shutter speed, brightness, FPS are camera/sensor dependent and have to be individually calibrated for optimal results

  • Make sure to use USB 3.0 camera in order to benefit from the full frame rate.

You can use VLC Media Player to test the video stream of the camera beforehand. If you are unsure which parts of the streaming URL you should use, select Custom Connection String and copy and paste the working string from VLC Media Player.

The other fields for the Camera Connection can be found in the manual of the camera and/or can be configured on the camera itself.

There are some special characters, which could lead to problems with the connection to the camera. If possible, avoid characters like "?", "%" and "+" in the password field.

As soon as you got the Camera Connection configured, you will see one frame of the camera as a preview. You can now start with the Scenario Configuration from here.

Preview frame

The Swarm Perception Box sends the results from the real-time analysis to an MQTT broker. The default configuration will send data to Azure Cloud and to Data Analytics for retrieving the data. If you want to configure a Custom MQTT, see more info in the Advances set-up section of the documentation.

Using Message Compression can save up to 50% of the bandwidth used for sending events to the MQTT broker. Be aware that the broker needs to be configured for compression as well

Camera monitoring status

In the device configuration, you have seen the overall status of the cameras included in one Perception Box. On the camera level, you have the option to see the individual status to better identify the root cause of the issue (see mark 4 in the overview above).

Camera & Device Monitoring

As soon as you see a frame of your camera, you have the option to configure your Scenarios. This is where the magic happens! --> See next page!