Camera coverage map: every camera on the floor plan

A camera coverage map is a floor plan with every camera pinned where it hangs, aimed the way it is aimed, with its health shown on the pin. It answers two questions a list of camera names cannot: where is this camera, and if it goes down, what stops being covered. The MentatNOC Coverage page is that map for a managed fleet. Each pin carries the same live health as the fleet board, and each cone is a labeled estimate of reach built from the camera model’s own optics.

Most fleets already have a coverage map of a kind. It is the as-built drawing from install day, a PDF in a shared folder, and it stopped being true the first time a camera was swapped, a dome was re-aimed, or a wall moved. Nobody updates it because nothing reads it. The Coverage page is the as-built that stays current, because the pins are the same devices the platform is already watching. It is also where the next cameras get planned: walls, mounting height, zones that pass or fail against a required level, and an exportable plan sheet all sit on the same map.

What the map shows

A site has one or more plans: a floor, a building, a yard. A plan is an uploaded floor-plan image. Pins sit on the plan at each camera’s position, and every pin has a color for its current state, a heading, and a cone for the direction and reach of its view.

The states are the fleet board’s states: healthy, warning, offline, and no data. An offline pin gets a halo so it stands out on a busy floor. The counts strip above the plan totals the placed cameras and how many are offline, in warning, or reporting nothing. When a camera’s state changes, its pin changes within seconds, without a reload.

An incident focus button dims every healthy pin and selects the first offline one. That is the view for the moment the phone rings: which camera, which door, how much of the floor.

Click a pin to inspect it: model, site, heading, field of view, reach level, criticality, and the four reach distances. Double-click a pin and the device evidence page opens for that camera, with its live snapshot, tamper evidence, firmware, and the actions that can be run on it. It is the same page the fleet board links to. The map opens the evidence rather than keeping a second copy of it. If the camera is offline, why security cameras go offline is the runbook. If it is online and pointed at a wall, camera tamper detection is the one.

Cones are a model-based estimate, not a survey

The cone on each pin is drawn from two real inputs. The first is the camera’s lens profile: the horizontal field of view at the wide and tele ends and the sensor’s pixel width, taken from the vendor datasheet for that model. The second is a DORI level from IEC 62676-4, the standard that defines detect, observe, recognize, and identify as pixel-density thresholds of 25, 63, 125, and 250 pixels per meter.

Put those together and a camera’s reach at each level is a distance rather than a guess. Each placement carries one reach level, defaulted by what the camera is for. An entrance camera draws to identify range, a cash point to recognize, a general camera to observe, an exterior camera to detect. Change the level and the cone resizes on the spot. A varifocal or motorized-zoom model gets a field-of-view slider between its wide and tele ends, and the reach follows the way it does on the real lens: narrower view, longer reach. A panoramic model draws a full circle at its published distances.

The legend states it plainly: cones are a model-based estimate, not a survey. Mounting height, tilt, and walls can be drawn into the plan, as described below. Lighting is not modeled, and neither is anything on site that nobody drew. What the estimate gives you is the right order of magnitude for the right model, so a wide-angle dome and a zoomed bullet on the same wall stop looking the same. A camera whose model has no lens profile yet still places, still shows health, and draws direction only until a profile is added. Profiles are built from Axis, Bosch, and Hanwha datasheets, each with its source on record. An integrator can also add its own camera models, with the datasheet source recorded, and those take precedence for that customer’s plans.

Calibrate the plan once

Reach distances need a scale. Calibration is two clicks and one number: click both ends of something whose length you know, a hallway, a wall, a parking row, and type the distance in feet. From then on every cone on that plan draws at its true scaled length. An uncalibrated plan still works, but it draws short, direction-only wedges, and the legend says so.

Place, move, aim

Placing a camera is a click. Place mode lists the site’s cameras that are not yet on a plan; pick one, click the spot, and it is pinned. Drag the pin to move it. Drag the aim handle on a selected pin to rotate it: the cone follows live, Shift snaps the heading to 15-degree steps, and the arrow keys nudge it for fine work. Each edit saves on release and lands in the audit log with who changed what.

Placing a floor plan’s worth of cameras is built to be fast. The next pin reuses the last model, reach level, and criticality picked. A marquee drag or Ctrl+A selects many pins at once for a group move, delete, or edit, a pin can be duplicated or have its optics copied to others, and Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo. A camera schedule can also be imported from a CSV file straight onto the plan, with a preview that flags any bad row by its line number before anything lands.

Editing is for integrator and operator users. A client user sees the same plan, pins, and cones and cannot move anything.

Planned cameras on the same plan

A proposal needs the cameras that exist and the cameras that do not, on one drawing. Coverage has no separate planning mode. A planned camera is placed the same way, with a label and a model picked from the profile list, and it draws differently: a hollow, dashed pin and a hatched cone. It has no health and never counts toward offline, warning, or no data. The placed count is installed cameras only by default; a show-as-planned toggle adds the proposed ones back for the as-planned figure. The fleet board’s mini map shows the installed count with the planned count beside it.

When the device is installed and onboarded, the operator promotes the pin: pick the real camera from the roster and the pin keeps its position and aim, gains its health, and drops the planned styling. Nothing is re-placed, and the proposal drawing and the live map never drift apart.

The case this was built for is a site with a full interior fleet today and an exterior expansion on a quote. One map, both sets, the same cones, and a client who can see the proposal in place before a single camera ships.

Walls, mounting height, and tilt

Draw a wall as a line across the plan and every cone that meets it stops at the wall. Glass is its own kind of wall and never clips, so a storefront window behaves on the plan the way it does on site. Drag a wall’s corner and the cones re-clip as it moves.

A pin can also carry a mount height and a downward tilt. With either set, the cone becomes a band on the floor: a dead zone directly under the camera, where a camera on a high ceiling cannot see, and a far edge shorter than the flat reach. Leave both empty and the cone keeps its flat reach. Height and tilt can be applied to a group of pins in one step.

Zones: pass or fail against the requirement

A cone shows where a camera points. A zone says whether the area that matters is covered to the level the job needs. A zone is a named area on the plan with a required DORI level and a pass threshold: the lobby door at identify, the cash office at recognize, the yard at detect. The map checks each zone against every camera’s cone, walls included, and marks it PASS or FAIL with the share covered. Raise a zone’s required level and a passing zone can fail on the spot; draw a wall through it and the covered share drops.

Three tools answer the follow-up questions. Overlap heat shades the plan by how many cones cover each spot, which shows where two cameras watch the same door and where one camera is the only one. Inspect answers the question at a single point: click anywhere inside a cone and read the distance, the pixels per foot, and the DORI level that camera achieves there. Entrance gaps lists every entrance camera that falls short of identify coverage in front of it, such as one aimed at a wall.

Reach a point, and size the storage

Reach a point answers the installer’s question directly. Select a pin, click the spot it has to see, a gate or a door 40 feet out, and read the field of view and zoom position the lens needs. Apply it and the cone narrows to match. If the point is beyond what that model can reach, the three closest models in the catalog are listed instead.

The storage tile turns the plan into a number. Set the retention period, the codec, and each camera’s bitrate, choose continuous or motion recording with its share of the day, and the total appears in terabytes. For an estimate outside a plan, the camera storage calculator does the same arithmetic for a mixed fleet.

Revisions, exports, and install photos

A revision is a named snapshot of the whole plan: placements, walls, zones, scale, and settings. Save one before a rework, compare any two revisions or one against the live plan to see what moved, turned, or disappeared, and restore one by typing its name to confirm.

Two downloads cover a bid. The plan sheet PDF puts the calibrated drawing, with cones, dead zones, walls, and pins, on the first page and the camera schedule on the pages after it. The camera schedule also downloads as a CSV.

Each pin can carry install and context photos. Hovering a pin shows its newest install photo with its name and health, which answers whether it was mounted the way the plan says without a site visit. Location data is stripped from every photo on upload.

Planning is for integrator and operator users. A client user sees the plan, the walls, the zones and their results, and the storage total, and cannot change anything.

Zoom, sites, and the fleet board

Large plans need zoom. The map zooms from fit to 8x with the wheel, the toolbar, a pinch on a touch screen, or the keyboard, and pans by drag. Clicks, drags, and calibration stay accurate at any zoom. A site filter narrows the plan list to one site. The site view on the fleet board carries a compact, read-only copy of that site’s plan with the most cameras, with a click through to the full map, and Coverage sits directly under Fleet in the navigation for operator and client views alike.

What it does not do

Coverage is not a site survey. Cones, dead zones, and zone results are computed from each model’s optics, the plan’s scale, and the walls, height, and tilt drawn on it. They do not see lighting, glare, or a new shelf nobody drew, so walk the site before a bid is final. Once the cameras are in, Coverage is the live map of the cameras you actually have: where they are, where they point, and whether they are working right now. It monitors device health, not video. Plans are PNG images for placement; a PDF of the drawing can be stored alongside for reference.

Doing this across 500 cameras

The manual version of this map is the as-built PDF, a spreadsheet of camera names, and one person who remembers which dome is which. At 50 cameras that person exists. At 500 across a dozen sites they do not, and the first time it matters is the moment a camera goes dark and the question is where it is and what it covered. On the Coverage page the pin is already red, the halo is on the loading dock, and the evidence is a double-click away. The next expansion is planned on the same drawing, zone by zone, with the plan sheet ready to hand to the client.

Coverage is part of the MentatNOC platform for every fleet, alongside the fleet board, actions, and compliance evidence. See it running against a 500-camera fleet on the interactive demo.