Patent ID: 7151558

Claim:
A monitor camera system comprising: a monitor camera rotatable in panning directions and in tilting directions and having control means, a timer and a memory; and a controller, disposed outside said monitor camera, for controlling said monitor camera, wherein said control means of the monitor camera receives a first instruction from said controller, said control means starts the timer on a first time base in response to the first instruction, said controller receives a command and sends the command and a time stamp indicative of a reception time of the command on the first time base to the control means of the monitor camera, said control means holds an auto-tracing record including the command and the time stamp sent from said controller in the memory in auto-tracing learning, said control means receives a second instruction from said controller, said control means again starts the timer on a second time base in response to the second instruction, starts auto-tracing implementation in response to the second instruction, reads out the auto-tracing record from the memory without control of said controller, and executes the command of said auto-tracing record in the auto-tracing implementation at an executing time of the second time base corresponding to the reception time indicated by the time stamp of the auto-tracing record to cause the monitor camera to conduct a monitoring operation according to the auto-tracing record without control of said controller, and at the auto-tracing implementation, said monitor camera interprets a constant recording speed indicated by the timer as a constant reproduction speed different from the constant recording speed by a predetermined rate to implement the auto-tracing, which is learned at the constant recording speed in the auto-tracing learning, at the constant reproduction speed in said auto-tracing implementation.