Can IP Security camera be tampered by flash of another camera? [duplicate]

Question

We have been using a new IP camera (Cleverdog) to monitor work in our clothing line factory since a week. It has new features like Infrared, Motion detection, Sound and we can also give instructions through in-built speaker. The recorded footage can be viewed Live on our mobile phone like most IP Camera features.

Since today the footage looks like it's gone Pink x-Ray mode. Everything is washed out and shadows are in shades of magenta.

My question regarding Flash Light is due to the footage that we saw. From recording saved on phone and Cloud, we could make out this happened after a man appeared in front of the screen. Suddenly, screen blanked out to full white. Right after that, next frame onwards the footage has changed to burnt pink x-ray. (Sorry, I couldn't copy a screen-shot for reference)

We are now 3000 miles away from site of IP Camera and tried options given in remote settings but nothing seems to work. We have asked a friend to visit and restart Camera but are less hopeful about any change since we had restarted it via online a few times without much change in the footage.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It is possible to destroy a CCD using very strong light or, even better, a laser (a portable green/blue laser is enough), but the result will be "dead" pixels either in spots, such as in here, or in whole columns and rows depending on the CCD architecture. This holds true even for 3-CCD and Foveon systems, since it's very unlikely for the whole surface to get burned - unlikely as it is that such a system is employed in a surveillance camera.

Your symptoms seem to indicate that the whole green channel has disappeared or is no longer encoded/transmitted.

There are some AGC troubles that will give similar symptoms, and may not recover from a reboot but need a complete power cycle. What happens is that red and blue channels are boosted at the expense of the green one.

Another possibility is that the camera is stuck in "infrared" mode (even if this is usually B&W), or both systems are running at once and interfering. Here, again, a power cycle might help, but a soft reboot should have, and yet it didn't.

But it almost looks like (a screen capture would have helped) the CCD assembly and the encoder are actually separated assemblies inside the camera, and they're connected through a VGA line... whose green wire got disconnected (e.g. by a shock). This would account for the magenta bias, even if it still doesn't satisfactorily explain the washed-out appearance. But similar problems are known and due to the CCD packaging.

Barring a very unusual internal construction of the device, I do not see a laser or a flashlight wreak this kind of havoc. Unless one took a large laser assembly and used it to smartly rap against the camera body.