TECHNICAL BUYER GUIDE
A practical AI CCTV pilot worksheet
Define success before testing. Use the same scenes and criteria for every candidate, and record failures as carefully as useful alerts.
1. Agree the observation
Write one observable event, the zone, operating hours, permitted exceptions and the person who reviews it. Example: a person enters a closed loading bay after the agreed shift. This is an illustrative test scenario, not a customer result.
2. Document the test conditions
Record camera model, firmware, lens/view, stream settings, processing configuration, software version and date. Include day/night, glare, weather where relevant, occlusion, legitimate workers and deliberate negative examples. Obtain permission for footage and identification tests.
3. Keep a ground-truth event log
| Record | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Eligible real events | Manually label events using the pre-agreed definition, independent of the detector output. |
| True / false alerts | Count correct alerts and alerts where the eligible event did not occur. |
| Missed events | Count eligible events with no usable alert; include outages separately. |
| Delay | Record event time and receipt time with synchronised clocks; report the distribution, not just the fastest example. |
| Availability and recovery | Log stream loss, reconnection and operator intervention. |
4. Report denominators and limitations
Precision = true alerts / all alerts. Recall = detected eligible events / all eligible events. When the denominator is zero, report not measured. State sample size, observation duration and excluded conditions. Model confidence is not measured accuracy.
Agree acceptance criteria before the test; do not select a threshold after seeing the results. Small samples and staged scenes do not prove performance at another site.
5. Decide and assign ownership
Record pass, revise or stop against each requirement. Document who owns follow-up, maintenance, data retention and human review. Analytics is supplementary monitoring, not certified protective equipment or automatic proof of misconduct.