WiLife's Powerline NetCam System

In Use, continued

Figure 9 shows a portion of the Playback Navigation screen. On this video review screen you can scroll back and forth in time, looking for, and viewing change events.

Figure 9: Video Review

Videos of an event can be protected from deletion or saved for permanent storage. This capability worked well and was easy to use. As far as change-detection itself, I found that it worked pretty well, with the exception that it still flagged cars driving by that were well outside of the zones I defined. Changes occurring inside my zones were consistently detected. Figure 10 shows the detection of a delivery man walking up my driveway with a package. You can see that the picture quality is pretty good.

Figure 10: Change Detection Event

This camera had a manual focus that I found a little bit difficult to get right, but once it was set up, it returned a nice picture. WiLife advertises up to 15 fps (frames per second) of live video, and my testing showed that the figure they gave was fairly accurate unless there was a lot of movement.

Figure 11 shows a screen capture taken during a rainstorm. During this period, I was lucky to get 5 fps (frames per second); the picture quality suffered as well. If our neighborhood arsonist were to strike during a rainstorm, we wouldn't have much chance in identifying him from such a picture.

Figure 11: Rainstorm Capture

I also wanted to try the system out at night since that was the most likely time for our arsonist to visit. The camera I was testing was not designed for low-light usage, but WiLife does sell an add-on device that does IR-illumination for night usage. Since I didn't have this add-on device to test, my nighttime picture (shown in Figure 12) came out very dark.

Figure 12: Nighttime Capture