Body worn integration

• North America
• Europe, except from Turkey and Russia
• Australia and New Zealand

Availability in more countries/regions is planned for next year. Stay tuned for updated information on this page or contact your local Axis office if you have any urgent requests.

Footage from Axis body worn cameras is a useful tool for teaching personnel how to respond to situations they’re likely to encounter. For example, you can analyze footage of an incident. Or use portions of an encounter as the basis for testing how students would respond to a similar set of circumstances before revealing the real outcome.

Axis body worn solution - including the robust camera, docking stations and system controller - has been designed as an open system architecture, which allows for integration with video management systems (VMS) and evidence management systems (EMS), making the solution incredibly flexible.

You can plug Axis body worn solutions right into an Axis video management system or use your own preferred system. You can store video in the cloud or onsite. Either way you’ll do a better-than-ever job of deterring and protecting, and of gathering documentation and forensic evidence. And of course, Axis body worn solutions give you superior image quality and video that holds up in court.

The Axis body worn solution brings several concrete advantages, e.g.:

• Store as much footage as you need without compromising image quality

• View and label material from any cell phone (mobile app will be released during Q3 2020)

• Find and retrieve evidence quickly and easily

• Easy integration with VMS & EMS systems

• Cost effective and scalable solution

• Designed from the ground up with cybersecurity in mind

To help you build a strong integration with Axis body worn solution, we have developed trainings, API’s, code examples and important information about things you should consider when designing your integration. Follow the step-by-step guidelines below to learn more about suggested architecture, development examples and recommended considerations.

The fastest way to get to know and get a good understanding of the Axis body worn solution is to read the introduction presentation and run the online training. You will learn about the components involved, the capabilities offered and various security aspects.

• Introduction presentation – for integration of Axis body worn (pdf)

• Run the online training

• Sample code of golang implementation: AxisBodyWornSwiftServiceExample_R1.1.2.zip
• Download the sample code, have a look at the source code and check how the containers are structured
• Capture a network trace to see the flow in detail
• Read the Body worn API documentation
• Compare the network trace calls with the Body worn API documentation
• The Golang code works both for Windows and Linux, but in the example below we focus on how it runs on Windows

• Download the AxisBodyWornSwiftServiceExample_R1.1.2.zip
• Use the sample code above. You can either compile the source code once again or simply run the "AxisBodyWornSwiftServiceExample.exe" file
• Install Windows Axis body worn Swift service example
• Find the "Command Prompt" from Windows start menu, right click and choose "Run as administrator"
• Install Axis body worn Swift service example by changing the directory where "AxisBodyWornSwiftServiceExample.exe" is located in the command line window and enter the following command: AxisBodyWornSwiftServiceExample.exe install
   

Follow the install instructions to configure Axis body worn Swift service example. For example:

• Create a username and password (You will not be able to see what you type as password)
• Enter storage location: Choose where you want to keep the recordings from the body worn system
• Choose the port to use or leave it empty to use 8080
• Choose IP address: 169.254.220.88 (Local Area Connection 1)
• Do you want to use HTTPS: y. (optional, for testing use HTTP instead of HTTPS)

If you have a NAS device with Swift server or an application that works as a Swift Server, you can try setting it up as a content destination for the body worn system as well. Learn more about the Swift API if you need a deeper understanding of the API.

In order to test, upload the config file in the Body Worn Manager. You can do this either during the setup wizard or afterwards in the content destination tab.

If you get any errors, please make sure that the Windows firewall is not blocking. You can disable it temporary or configure the correct ports that enable the communication.

The containers storing the files will be created in the directory specified during installation. The uploader needs a json connection file which will have been auto generated. It is located in the storage location specified during installation, named as config.json.

The Body Worn Manager handles all camera configuration. The data is pushed form the body worn system to the content destination. This is different from how you normally integrate with other Axis cameras. The VMS or EMS is acting like a server and listening for data that is pushed from the system controller. At the end of the transfer you will get a video and metadata, while all the configuration takes place outside the content destination in the Body Worn Manager.

After configuration, by running the “AxisBodyWornSwiftServiceExample.exe” or of the general Swift server, please try filming a few clips and offloading them to your server. You can use Wireshark to sniff the network and get API calls during the transfer.

To understand the file structures that the swift server creates, consult the body worn API documentation.

• Root directory is the directory which is chosen during installation. It will store all containers.
• Users is a container that will store all user metadata. It contains users.metadata.json object which is the metadata for the container Users. For every user, it will create an empty object with the name <userid>. It will also create user metadata for this object which will be named Users.<userid>.metadata.json.
• Devices has the same structure as Users container but contains all the metadata for devices.

For every recording, a new container will be created. It is named as <userid>_<deviceid>_date_time where Username is the nice name and userid is the UUID of the user who was assigned to the camera when it was recording and deviceid is the id of the camera that did the recording.

Note that if the user who did the recording for some reason doesn't exist in the Users folder, the naming of the container will instead be <userid>_<deviceid>_date_time.

In every recording container there will be one or multiple clips with the naming <date>_<time>_<id>.<mkv|mp4>. And its corresponding metadata, <containername>.<moviename>.metadata.json. There will also be a metadata file for the container which is called <containername>.metadata.json

To make integration easier, the 'status: Complete' metadata attribute value of a container is also available as a zero size file named 'complete', inside the container directory, when it is set. Thereby an integrating application can notify/watch for that file to appear instead of polling and parsing the json metadata file.

Axis body worn solution is constantly evolving with new features and functions. Our recent development is the Capability API. It allows you to integrate our extended and updated features in your own timeline. It is backwards compatible, which makes sure that if the capabilities API is not supported in your integration, it will work as it is used to, without any effect.

For instance, StoreBookmarks capability allow the user to tag each clip with a category and notes out in the field using the body worn assistant application, available in Android's Google Play and on the iOS App Store. If you have not implemented StoreBookmarks yet to parse the new notes and categories from the end user, it will simply turn off that functionality in our app. You can find more information on the Body worn API.

You are now prepared to start your implementation. It is up to you to decide which programming language to use, but feel free to look at parts of the sample code and convert them to your choice of programming language.

• FAQs for Body worn integration

Axis body worn is designed to be used with HTTPS, however, during the first development phase it is better to use HTTP since encryption will make things complicated to debug.

You can get video files in MP4 or MKV format, including Audio codec AAC (48kHz only). If you get your file in MKV format you can later on use the AXIS Media Control SDK to parse the data.

You should pay attention on how you would like to store the metadata information, i.e. in XML or txt format. You probably want to have a strategy for storing the metadata and videos together. Do not forget to show interesting metadata to the user if needed.

You should send “200 OK” to the system controller to complete the file transfer. The system controller will then delete the recording and you will own the data. So, before sending “200 OK”, make sure that the file transfer is completed, and that the file is not corrupt.

Save and handle the data in your content destination. Once you have received the data, you need to handle it in a good and secure way.

If your system is offline, the system controller will try to push data regularly and will keep the recordings until they are transferred.