Camera board • Re: Arducam IMX462 Ultra Low Light Camera Review

Here's a message in the bottle for anyone wanting good daylight/nighttime performance camera for their Raspberry PI or any other security project:

https://amcrest.com/4k-poe-camera-turre ... ai-v3.html

I bought this 8MP / 4K camera for $75, usually goes for $99 on Amazon. 2.7watts, comes with microphone, POE, turret housing, 1 year warranty, multiple streams H.265, H.264, low res MJPEG. They are out of Texas, and upon asking within 5 minutes had the API/SDK in my email box:


https://support.amcrest.com/hc/en-us/ar ... TP-API-SDK

https://support.amcrest.com/hc/en-us/ar ... ming-Guide



Here's a few sample images, these are heavily scaled down because the Forum won't allow a 20 megabyte photo in-lined.

Screenshot from 2025-01-18 14-30-01.png
Screenshot from 2025-01-18 14-30-01.png

Python Code was quite simple to lock onto the RSTP feed:

Code:

import cv2cap = cv2.VideoCapture("rtsp://admin:admin@192.168.0.109:554/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0")while(cap.isOpened()):    ret, frame = cap.read()    cv2.imshow('frame', frame)    if cv2.waitKey(20) & 0xFF == ord('q'):        breakcap.release()cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Browser code for MJPEG was as simple as pasting a URL into the browser or in a <video> tag

Code:

http://192.168.0.109/cgi-bin/mjpg/video.cgi?channel=1&subtype=1

There is a HTTP and C API to control the camera:

HTTP GET Commands in browser to Flip and Mirror the image for upside down turret:

Code:

http://192.168.0.109/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&VideoImageControl[0].Flip=truehttp://192.168.0.109/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&VideoImageControl[0].Mirror=true

I still might keep my PI-camera ambitions seeing that there are some that can take 64 or 100 mega pixel images during the day, and that might be great for vehicle / person / licence plate scanners, but I really like the cost to performance ratio of these 4k Cameras. They worked right out of the box without any sort of focus/exposure tweaking. No funky short/flimsy cables with different pins on the ends that if you don't plug it in on the right side the camera won't recognize. (The Arducam HDMI extender isn't a bad bang per buck, I was able to test it with a 15 foot 8k cable, and it worked great, didn't work with a 4k cable. Tried a 100' fiber optic HDMI cable and it didn't work. Arducam makes a 40' long ethernet camera extension kit, I bought it, never hooked it up or tried it out.).

The IR Illumination performance on this AMCREST thanks to the CMOS 1/2.7" sensor is phenomenal, They daylight was crisp. The H 264/265 w/audio will save a ton of bandwidth as well as CPU HP as it's all done on the camera side instead of the PI Side Super Impressed. So if you hook this up to your PI over LAN or WIFI, you should be able to dedicate all that saved CPU performance to do detection/recognition. You don't have to process the full resolution feed, you can also process one of the smaller subsampled feeds. You can also use their software with it at the same time.

Statistics: Posted by Arducam_Support — Mon Jan 20, 2025 5:09 am