Integrating CCTV systems into BACnet

Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems are used in modern buildings for different purposes. By the use of smart cameras, dedicated safety or security-critical events that may lead to an alarm condition can be detected autonomously (e.g., safety events like fire or security events like glass break). Integrating CCTV systems into building automation systems provides the opportunity to react to critical events by, for example, informing the operator about the occurrence of such events, providing relevant video data, and most important concurrently initiating appropriate actions (e.g., smoke extraction in case of fire). This paper focuses on the integration of such smart camera systems into BACnet based networks. At first, a short introduction to BACnet and its interworking model is given. Afterwards, a possible way of integrating CCTV systems into BACnet is presented. The functionality of this model is shown by a proof-of-concept implementation which is also described in this paper.