AI Bullet 4K Low Light
The flagship 4K AI bullet in the NOW Wireless range. Eight megapixels let one camera cover a multi-lane scene and give the AI digital-zoom precision inside the frame — no optical-zoom hardware required. Colour all the way down to 0.0008 lux for lit urban environments; 40 m of 850 nm invisible IR takes over when full darkness drops in. On-board AI events publish straight into SenseView for lower-bandwidth deployments, or pass the full 4K stream to a NOW Wireless AI box for the heavier classifiers.
Built for AI from dusk through full darkness.
A standard CCTV camera drops to monochrome infrared at night. That's fine for a human reviewer scanning footage, but for AI classification — vehicle make, type, livery, clothing, plate — colour is the single strongest feature the model is trained on. Lose the colour and you lose accuracy.
The CA-1010 is built so the colour data feed continues as far as the light goes. A 1/1.8″ back-illuminated sensor at F1.0 holds colour right down to 0.0008 lux — well below a lit residential street at 2 a.m. When ambient light disappears altogether — under unlit motorway, in rural cabinets, after dark in industrial yards — 40 m of invisible 850 nm IR takes over for monochrome plate work and presence detection. Same camera, same stream, no operational gap.
One camera, one cable, every light level.
A clean 4K colour stream of a multi-lane scene by day and lit night; 40 m invisible IR for full darkness; on-camera AI events for low-bandwidth alerting; full ONVIF Profile S / T / G / M to any modern VMS. Multi-tail cable carries Ethernet, alarm I/O and audio I/O on a single run up the column.
- Sensor
- 4K · 8 MP
- Lens
- 2.8 mm F1.0
- Min lux
- 0.0008
- View angle
- 112°
- IR reach
- 40 m
What the hardware does.
Colour to 0.0008 lux, then IR 40 m
Above 0.0008 lux — anywhere a streetlight is reaching — the CA-1010 publishes a full 4K colour stream. That's the format the AI is trained on: vehicle type, livery, clothing, behaviour, plate. As ambient light falls past that threshold the mechanical IR-cut filter retracts and 850 nm IR illuminators take over to 40 m. The transition is automatic and silent.
The 850 nm IR is invisible to drivers and pedestrians — no warm white supplement is enabled on the NOW Wireless range, by policy.
4K resolution that AI digital-zoom can actually use
The 2.8 mm lens gives a 112° horizontal field of view — the widest in the Bullet range. At a typical 6 m mast-arm or lamp-column mounting that's roughly 18 m wide on the carriageway: a 5-lane road with footways either side, or a full junction approach from one camera. The 8 megapixel sensor gives the AI 4× the pixels of a 1080p camera to zoom into — into one lane, one number plate, one pedestrian — without any optical-zoom hardware in the way. One fixed install runs many simultaneous AI tasks on the same frame.
A 4 mm fixed-lens variant is available where 89° H-FoV better suits the scene.
On-camera AI events
The CA-1010 runs vehicle, person and cyclist detection on the camera itself — no AI box required for the basic event set. Line crossing, region entry / exit, loitering, object-left and object-removed alerts publish over ONVIF event channels and a vendor-specific event API: straight into the NVR, straight into SenseView, straight into a third-party VMS. The full 4K stream runs in parallel for the heavier classifiers — DVLA cross-reference, journey-time and plate enrolment — that live on a NOW Wireless AI box or the SenseView server.
Event publishing happens at a small fraction of full-video bandwidth — useful where the back-haul to the control room is constrained.
Three ways to deploy this camera.
The CA-1010 supports all three deployment modes from day one. Mode A handles evidential capture, Mode B uses the on-camera AI for low-bandwidth alerting, and Mode C passes the full 4K stream to a NOW Wireless AI box for the heavy classifiers. Most installations combine more than one.
Capture & stream
Camera publishes live 4K video. Local storage on microSD, central NVR, roadside cabinet or cloud. No AI inference — pure capture and stream.
Smart events → SenseView
The camera runs the AI detection on-board. Line cross, region entry/exit, loitering, object-left/removed and vehicle/person classification publish to SenseView over standard event channels at a small fraction of full-video bandwidth.
Video → AI box → SenseView
Full 4K stream to an Nvidia-based AI box in the roadside cabinet, control room or cloud. The AI box runs the heavy classifiers — DVLA cross-reference, journey-time, plate enrolment — and feeds SenseView. Full feature set available.
What the AI platform adds.
The camera delivers clean colour video. SenseView turns that video stream into classified, queryable, evidential data — running at the edge on a NOW Wireless AI box, or centrally on the SenseView server. The CA-1010 is built to feed these workflows.
Traffic
- Counting and classification — vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians on roads, cycleways and pavements
- ANPR with DVLA cross-reference — type, licence, MOT, emissions, fuel, weight, year, engine
- Journey times and tracking — Bluetooth + ANPR, journey-time, start/end, Anywhere-to-Anywhere
- Turn analysis, desire lines, junction analysis
- Virtual loops — overhead detectors replacing in-road inductive loops without roadworks
- Queue detection with UTC/UTMC alert outputs
- Pedestrian-crossing automation — predictive activation
- Cross-city tracking — passive Bluetooth Digital Signatures + ANPR
Security
- Centralised CCTV management — multi-camera split-screen, PTZ control
- Multi-tier storage — on-camera SD, control-room NVR, cloud
- Facial recognition — face capture, identification, automated action
- Anti-social-behaviour and intrusion alerts
- Line crossing, region entry / exit, loitering, object-left / object-removed
Parking
- Free-space mapping — indoor and outdoor lots
- Indoor parking management — AI + camera, ANPR registration with time and plate
- On-street parking — illegal parking, paid-stay overstays, ANPR-driven enforcement
- Integration — forwards data to existing parking management systems
Cross-cutting capabilities
Real-time API and CSV export · DVLA cross-reference · GDPR-compliant data hashing · IoT integration via LoRa, Wi-Fi, Mesh or Ethernet · Air quality (NO₂, particles) and weather data sources · Google Journey Time integration (subscription required)
Typical applications.
Where the CA-1010 fits, mapped to the three buyer groups. As the 4K-and-IR camera in the range, it covers a wider scope than any other Bullet model.
Traffic
- Junction overview — single-camera coverage of 4–6 lane approaches at 4K
- Multi-zone counting and classification on a single frame — vehicle, cyclist, pedestrian
- Virtual loops and stop-line detection with on-camera event publishing
- ANPR — daytime plate reads and IR-assisted night-time plate work to 40 m
- Unlit rural and motorway approaches — IR covers the scene where street lighting doesn't
Security
- Public-realm CCTV — town squares, transit forecourts, residential estates with mixed lighting
- Council operator coverage — colour identification by day, IR identification after dark
- Anti-social-behaviour and intrusion — line cross and loitering alerts published from the camera
- Forensic 4K archive — multi-zone evidential review without losing detail
- Industrial yards and perimeter — unlit fence-line monitoring with IR plate capture
Parking
- ANPR-driven access at unlit car-park entrances — 40 m IR floods the lane and gantry
- On-street enforcement — illegal parking and paid-stay overstays day and night
- Free-space mapping across large lots with mixed or partial lighting
- Indoor parking deck — single 4K camera covers a wide bay row
- Overnight enforcement on unlit residential streets — IR plate capture without warm-white glare
Full technical specification.
The complete specification — sensor, optics, video pipeline, on-camera AI, network, storage, power, environmental and mechanical. Use this in place of a separate datasheet.
Imaging
- Image sensor
- 1/1.8″ progressive-scan back-illuminated CMOS
- Resolution
- 4K / 8 MP (3840 × 2160)
- Frame rate
- 25 fps PAL (main); 25 fps (sub)
- Min. illumination
- 0.0008 lux @ F1.0 colour; 0 lux with IR on
- Shutter time
- 1/3 s to 1/100 000 s
- Day / night
- Mechanical ICR — true day/night switch
- WDR
- 120 dB true WDR
- 3D DNR
- Yes
- BLC / HLC / Defog
- Yes
- White balance
- Auto / Manual / Indoor / Outdoor
- Image rotation
- 0° / 90° / 180° / 270°
- Illumination
- 40 m 850 nm invisible IR. Warm-white supplement disabled by policy across the NOW Wireless range to avoid blinding motorists.
Lens
- Focal length
- 2.8 mm or 4 mm fixed (model-dependent)
- Aperture
- F1.0
- Sensor format
- 1/1.8″
- Horizontal FoV
- 112° (2.8 mm) / 89° (4 mm)
- Vertical FoV
- ≈ 60° (2.8 mm) / ≈ 48° (4 mm)
- Diagonal FoV
- ≈ 128° (2.8 mm) / ≈ 103° (4 mm)
- IR cut filter
- Mechanical ICR
- Lens mount
- Integrated M12
Coverage at mount heights
- 4 m mount
- ≈ 12 m wide · 3–4 urban lanes
- 6 m mount
- ≈ 18 m wide · 5-lane carriageway with footways
- 8 m mount
- ≈ 24 m wide · 6+ motorway lanes
- Coverage assumption
- Level ground plane, horizontal mount, 2.8 mm lens, 112° H-FoV
Video
- Compression
- H.265+ / H.265 / H.264+ / H.264 / MJPEG
- Smart codec
- Yes — smart H.265+
- Bitrate
- 32 Kbps to 16 Mbps, CBR / VBR
- Streams
- Multi-stream — main 4K @ 25 fps, sub 1080p @ 25 fps, tertiary 720p
- ROI
- Configurable zones, per-stream
- Privacy masking
- Up to 8 zones
Audio
- Microphone
- Built-in dual omnidirectional
- Audio compression
- G.711 / G.722 / G.726 / AAC
- Audio bitrate
- 64 Kbps
- External audio I/O
- 1 in / 1 out (3.5 mm) plus separate speaker bus
AI & events (on-camera)
- On-camera detection
- Vehicle, person and cyclist classification
- Smart events
- Line crossing, region entry / exit, loitering, object-left, object-removed, tamper detection, crowd density
- People counting
- Standard and advanced (entry / exit, U-turn, queue)
- Heat map
- Yes
- Smart motion
- Yes — with vehicle / human classification
- Event streaming
- ONVIF event channels and extended vendor event API
- Heavy classifiers
- DVLA cross-reference, journey-time and plate enrolment performed by SenseView or NOW Wireless AI box (deployment Mode B or C)
Network
- Interface
- 1 × RJ45 10/100 Mbps
- Protocols
- TCP/IP · ICMP · HTTP · HTTPS · FTP · DHCP · DNS · DDNS · RTP · RTSP · RTCP · NTP · SMTP · IGMP · 802.1X · QoS · IPv4 · IPv6
- ONVIF
- Profile S, T, G, M
- API
- RTSP streaming · ONVIF · REST
- Authentication
- Digest · basic
- Encryption
- HTTPS · SSL/TLS · AES · IEEE 802.1X
Storage
- On-camera
- microSD slot, up to 256 GB
- External
- NAS via NFS / SMB
- NVR
- Standard NVR over ONVIF
- SenseView
- Control-room or cloud storage tier
Power
- PoE
- 802.3at Class 4 (max 25.5 W) — required for IR
- DC input
- 12 V DC ± 10%
- Typical consumption
- ≈ 8 W (IR off); ≈ 13 W (IR on)
- NW inline adapter
- Optional 24 V Passive PoE → 12 V DC for long cable runs
Environmental
- Operating temperature
- −30 °C to +60 °C
- Storage temperature
- −40 °C to +70 °C
- Operating humidity
- 0 – 95 % (non-condensing)
- Weather rating
- IP67
- Impact rating
- IK10 — vandal-impact resistant
Mechanical
- Dimensions
- ≈ 210 mm length × Ø 75 mm
- Weight
- ≈ 1.1 kg (camera body)
- Housing
- Aluminium alloy with integrated sun-shield
- Colour
- White
- Mounting
- Pendant · wall · ceiling — via external junction box (NW supplied)
- Cable
- Multi-tail — Ethernet, DC, alarm I/O, audio I/O, speaker bus
Compliance & certifications
- CE
- EMC · LVD · RoHS
- FCC
- Class A
- IEC
- 62676 (CCTV systems)
- Procurement
- NDAA-eligible — suitable for police, government and NDAA-restricted procurement
Ready to specify the CA-1010?
Talk to our technical team about coverage planning, on-camera event configuration, SenseView integration and mixed-camera deployment design.