Sunday, 1 May 2011

Video for Business Risk and Comfort

-- Physical Risk Protection --

Although we want to get as significantly revenues by means of the front door, we must close the back door so that the revenues stay in the organization. Sadly, the back door is not the only location where risk exists. Risk exists at the front door, side doors, the roof, and inside the doors as nicely. Video is a good means of addressing the risks by offering a deterrent impact as nicely as the evidence of behaviours or events.

We have been making use of a mix of access control, intrusion alarming and video surveillance as the collective protection mix. Every member of the mix has been implemented previously independent of each other. The price of installing, operating, and maintaining them is high. In addition, we pay for a separate monitoring and patrol service. We pay insurance premiums too. The price for protecting the small business is really high.

According to business sources, 1 in just about every 10 persons in New Zealand was the victim of house intrusion and property vandalism circumstances reported, and only half of the cases were resolved. This high rate of loss and low rate of resolution provides a lot of incentive for us to investigate the subject matter.

Technologies comes into the equation at this point. How do we deploy technology to lower risks and expenses for nowadays and tomorrow?

-- Physical Environmental Comfort --

A modern developing has ventilation, air conditioning, hot water supply, lifts, and lighting to offer a desirable working environment. These services do not happen naturally but are the result of investments and installations. Similar to security systems, they were previously separate but have began to turn into even more integrated lately. Can we integrate these comfort systems with risk prevention systems?

The short answer is yes. The principle of integration described in this paper is applicable.

-- From Yesterday to Currently --

Members of the protection mix are independent of each other. Feel of access control with door locks, intruder alarms with passive infrared detectors, fire and smoke alarms with specific sensors, and video surveillance with cameras. Most likely, an organization has installed 4 brands of equipment at the same time.

We are quite pleased to see today that some vendors have managed to collect signals from all members of the protection mix and to supply status views to enterprise owners or managers via a regular PC screen. Most events such as door locking or intruder detection are on/off in nature. That is, each and every event is perfect described by words such as ON or OFF, OPEN or CLOSE, and YES or NO. The specifics is vital but lacks visual connections.

In comes the video and the whole scenario springs to life. The building manager sits in the comfort of his chair in the control room. He can see who has just come in the door, the time of the day, name of the individual and what he/she is wearing today. He can track where he/she has navigated inside the campus which may be reasonably huge with restricted access areas. Yes, there is a privacy issue and this has to be declared beforehand. The declaration will provide a deterrent effect in case an individual contemplates to perform any unacceptable behaviour.

Video is expensive to install, operate and preserve. It has the greatest share of technologies advances for this reason. Yesterday we have analogue cameras. Nowadays we have IP cameras where IP stands for World wide web Protocol. IP cameras currently are alot more high priced than analogue cameras but they boost the level of effects considerably in areas not economically achievable with analogue. The most obvious advantage is image clarity. It is typical to have an IP camera with four times the pixel resolution of an analogue camera. The price may be five times more but wait. It has several a lot more desirable capabilities.

On the cost side, IP cameras can be installed further away from the monitoring or recording centre with standard and low price personal computer cable as against the even more expensive video coaxial cable for analogue cameras. The very same personal computer cable can carry electricity to power the camera but this is not doable for analogue cameras. These elements translate into cheaper installation and labour costs, higher high quality video and simpler operation and maintenance.

-- From Nowadays to Tomorrow --

IP is an open standard. We are secure to say that the Online is becoming alot more indispensable as time goes on. IP cameras will be installed at one corner of the world and its videos will be noticed at one more corner in the near future. This is a matter of Internet connection bandwidth.

Signal transmission media has fallen into two levels: optical fibre for high bandwidth and long distance, and copper wire for lower bandwidth and shorter distance. Let us assume (rightly) that an individual else such as the government or Internet operators will look right after optical fibres outside of our premises and we will look immediately after copper wire in our premises. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that an IP 1.3MP (Mega Pixel) camera produces 3Mbps and a dedicated copper cable can deal with 20 cameras comfortably.

Access control, intruder alarms, smoke and fire alarms etc do not use much transmission bandwidth. These systems can be very easily incorporated into the same cable running IP cameras.

This current state of technologies has pointed out that there is no technologies obstacle to all members of the mix to be IP based over time. The door lock and unlock controller will be based on an ultra simple PC in the future. We can manage door locks much less difficult than a desktop PC. This is not too far away.

Physical security will grow to be a customer of cyber security. The two matters are separate and one does not replace the other.

-- Video Surveillance Cameras --

There are various grades of analogue cameras. There are much more grades of IP cameras. This is for the reason that IP cameras have incorporated a lot more functions and variations that analogue cameras are not capable of.

The most fundamental example is the level of resolution of images. We have off-the-shelf models with 5MP (Mega Pixels) offering a panoramic view of 180 degrees for example. One such IP camera has 10 times the level of details of the finest analogue camera. There are numerous variations of resolutions in the IP range.

One more example is Dual Streaming. A typical IP camera is capable of producing 2 video streams of distinctive resolutions and frame rates. One goes to the control centre for recording and one goes to a mobile phone for real time viewing. Similarly an IP camera can generate 1 video stream only but the control centre can scale down the resolution and frame rate for client viewing. Analogue cameras can't present this.

-- Video Surveillance Recording --

As the PC business is rather competitive, the regular PC storage device called Hard Disk Drive (HDD) has turn into the de facto storage device for security systems. Nevertheless, it will make far more sense if we use the standard PC as the recording device, computation device and communication device as well as the display device. This will propel the security industry further to merge with PC technologies which is undergoing quickly developments.

Network Video Recorder (NVR) is the name given to the recording device that is fully PC based. However, some manufacturers have produced NVR that does not have the full PC flexibility in order to support the plug and play habits of some system installers when they transition from analogue to IP cameras. Whilst modular, these devices have been created proprietary and lock buyers in. They lose some of the positive aspects connected with open platform such as ease of repair or flexibility of expansion.

-- Beyond Risk and Comfort --

An open platform based NVR is capable of taking on extra advanced functions such as intelligent security analysis or object counting.

We are in a position to apply more intelligence such as counting the quantity of objects entering a boundary or passing by means of a trip wire. The object can be human or a vehicle. We are able to convert images into numbers such as vehicle licence plate numbers or meaningful patterns such as gun shape or a jacket hood over the head. In fact, there is no limit on intelligent applications.

The subject matter is referred to as Video Analytics. More offerings are turning up on the horizon over time.

-- Guidance --

There are 2 standard criteria for asset obtain decisions: fitness for purpose and total cost of ownership. They will be sufficient if options remain stationary with respect to time. Possibilities do not stay stationary as far as video surveillance technologies is concerned. The transitioning trend has grow to be the 3rd criteria for choice generating. Consider the choices on the market and how the organization can use these selections in the near future to extend either the upper line or the bottom line of the organization.

Pay attention to developments of open platform technologies.

END

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