Systems and methods for wireless digital video monitoring

Abstract

Portable surveillance and monitoring systems are provided for effecting portable video capture, wireless transmission of video data from one or more portable video capture units (VCUs) to a central monitoring station (CMS) and wireless control of the one or more VCUs from the CMS. One or more portable VCUs are equipped with digital cameras and are located to capture video in a region of interest. Each VCU comprises a plurality of directional antennas, each of which provides antenna gain over a particular azimuthal angular range. Each VCU also comprises a controller which is configured to select a particular one of its antennas and a particular channel identifier (CID) signal and associated frequency hopping sequence which are used to implement frequency hopping spread spectrum wireless communication between the VCU and the CMS. The controller of each VCU may select the best antenna and CID combination on the basis of response time and/or received signal strength of ping operations performed by the VCU controller. The VCUs allow a user to concentrate on pointing the camera at the region of interest (i.e. to capture the video content of interest) without worrying about how the orientation of the VCU will impact communication with the CMS.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.