When designing a surveillance system that is to be used in the outdoors, changing lighting conditions are one of the biggest challenges to overcome. So over the past several years, low-light surveillance technology has been growing in importance as a means to improve outdoor surveillance designs, and megapixel imagers have been modified to improve identification.

Copper theft has become a major crime in the United States, thanks to record prices for the metal and hard economic times. As a New York Timesarticle put it, the current conditions have “spurred a resurgence in the past several months in the theft of common items that in better economic times might be overlooked — among them, catalytic converters from automobiles and copper wiring that is being stripped out of overhead power lines, tornado warning sirens, coal mines and foreclosed homes, where thieves sometimes tear down walls to get to copper pipes and wiring.”