Combining sensor technologies, a motion detector called Eyetec from Siemens Building Technologies (Zug, Switzerland; www.siemens.com) senses body heat with an infrared detector and captures motion patterns at up to 15 m with a CMOS sensor. Software evaluates motion patterns and uses fuzzy logic to determine object size, speed, and direction of travel. If an alarm is triggered, the detector archives the images for later use to trace the cause of an incident. Users can set the conditions for triggering an alarm-either directly at the detector or at a PC-making it possible to prevent animals from triggering the alarm because their size does not correspond to that of humans.
The detector can also be set to trigger an alarm if it senses people walking in a particular direction, which means, for example, that museum staff can monitor if visitors actually leave exhibition rooms after closing. Also, by marking certain areas on a live image of a monitored room, the user can allow people to enter these zones without triggering the alarm.
