Strong investment in IP video surveillance
Video surveillance is now an integral part of the security landscape in major urban and regional centres, transport hubs and indeed where ever high value and sensitive assets require protection. Stevan Ristic writes that the capabilities of Internet protocol video surveillance is having a significant impact on the security market.
Internet protocol (IP) is one of those disruptive technologies that has irrevocably changed the video surveillance paradigm. Applications that were once the realm of only science fiction movies are fast becoming mainstream.
The world's biggest entertainment and telecommunications organisations are frenetically investing in networks and applications that will enable the transmission of video to consumers via IP.
Consumers can have video streamed to their mobile handsets, their computers or even their televisions. The seemingly unending increases in available bandwidth, improvements in compression technology and the continual price reductions are irrefutable signs that "video anywhere" is the talk of the town.
The video surveillance industry is riding the wave of this global investment. What IP brings to video is the ability to transmit images across the globe with little degradation in quality. Of course, bandwidth is the big issue and the key determinant in the quality of the video reproduced at the other end.
Despite advances in video compression algorithms, video transmission is still bandwidth hungry. It will be some time before you'll be able to stream video at DVD quality cost effectively from your regional office in Australia to your head office in London; although the speed with which this may occur continually surprises even the experts. And the key phrase is "cost effectively". If you can afford it, the bandwidth is there.
Having said this, IP video transmission on a local area network (LAN) has long since reached the point of high-quality, full-bandwidth video transmission. The bottleneck is leaving the LAN. Still, the quality of the remote video transmission is good. Good enough to make effective security decisions based on these remotely transmitted images.
Coupled with traditional alarm monitoring services, services such as ADT's visual verification services provide response centres with video images associated with an alarm so that the operators can make a quick decision about the necessary action and respond to the alarm accordingly.
Power of convergence
Now, let's look at what I call the power of convergence. One of the often cited major challenges with video surveillance is being able to recognise an important and actionable event in real time rather than after it has already occurred. Surround a guard with a bunch of video monitors and their ability to spot an incident diminishes rapidly within tens of minutes.
It is a well accepted fact that we humans have a limited attention span. The industry is continually striving for improved ways of electronically detecting an incident, initiating video recording and prompting a guard to respond. Using these electronic detection systems not only improves the speed of response but also dramatically reduces the amount of video that needs to be stored.
The world of IP brings a significant benefit in this area - the ability to respond to electronic triggers from a wide range of sources from anywhere in the world. These triggers need not be directly wired into your video recorder of choice. With the right protocols and permissions in place, the trigger can arrive via an IP network be it public, private, wired or wireless from anywhere.
In turn, the video can be transmitted to a host of locations and different devices: control rooms, mobile handsets, patrol cars or a web browser. IP opens a world of possibilities.
IP bridges geographic and system boundaries like no other technology in the modern age.
Video analytics
IP video can also provide data for business analytics such as emerging retail applications which are starting to help optimise store layouts based on analysis of store traffic around merchandise.
Smart cameras today also incorporate complex algorithms and process video based on pre-determined rules. Cameras can be set with virtual tripwires to provide real-time monitoring of an area and alert operators when a trip-wire is crossed.
People counting, loitering and the direction of movement can also be monitored and alerts raised if the camera detects a change in scene.
For retailers, this can only be good news if a recent survey entitled "The Global Retail Theft Barometer" is anything to go by. Asia-Pacific retailers interviewed for the survey believed that 33.6 per cent of internal theft occurred on the sales floor, 33.4 per cent in the stockroom/delivery bay and 33.1 per cent of internal theft occurred at the checkout. These findings indicate that all areas of a store need to be under surveillance.
Furthermore, in Australia, employee theft was regarded as being responsible for 40.2 per cent of "shrinkage", strengthening the trend for storewide surveillance.
To combat these losses, Australian retailers spent $506m of retail sales on security in the 12 months to June 2007. A significant percentage of Asia-Pacific retailers' security budget went on security equipment ($877m - 40.4 per cent) and IT.
Visit the ADT Security website (www.adtsecurity.com.au) for further details about surveillance solutions.
About the author: Stevan Ristic is the national product manager for ADT Security. With more than a century's worth of experience and providing electronic security solutions to more than eight mission residential, commercial and retail customers worldwide, ADT Security is the world's largest electronic security company.