Screen scene

Sure enough, within a matter of minutes four officers had collared the two teenagers and brought the melee to a halt. The perfect outcome for any surveillance scheme, but that which has just opened for business in David Beckham's back yard is no ordinary CCTV rig.

Billed as "the most sophisticated CCTV Control Room and surveillance system in England", the £3.2 million state-of-the-art National Car Parks (NCP)-run Control Room is capable of tracking possible or suspected offenders right across the city in extraordinary clarity thanks to a 400-plus camera installation covering main thoroughfares and side streets, stores, bars and car parking areas.

Operators in the Control Room – which officially opened for business in July – monitor up to 180 high resolution digital images displayed on broadcast quality backlit projection screens spread across a vast monitoring wall spanning 18 metres. The IBM-designed digital platform being used here is capable of storing images for up to 92 days, or 30 years in the case of sensitive material.

Since trials of the system began in April, this highly sophisticated security set-up has been credited with thwarting a murder and a kidnapping, has given rise to 150 additional arrests and helped in part to reduce vehicle crime in the city (by 40% over the past 18 months). Pictures of criminal behaviour can be taken at a distance of five miles away, yet they'll still be good enough quality to be used in a Court of Law. Impressive stuff indeed.

The selection process
The CCTV initiative was forged back in June 1999 between Manchester City Council and NCP as part of the city centre's regeneration after it was devastated by the IRA bomb some six years ago. The joint venture company – dubbed NML – involved an investment from NCP of a not-insubstantial £10 million. Since NML was formed it has funded a steady improvement in the condition of Manchester's city centre off-street car parks. The creation of the ultra-high tech Control Room is the latest development in this funding programme with the City Council.

The Control Room itself had to be designed around two distinctly different operations – namely proactive Manchester City Council use and the rather more reactive requirements of NCP. The Council requirement was for a system whereby dedicated officers would monitor the camera images on a round-the-clock basis looking for on-street incidents, working on radio-linked information supplied by the police, retail or licensed premises.

A simple yet dynamic solution was needed for rapid selection and flexibility. Above all, the images rendered had to be of sufficient quality to be used in criminal prosecutions.

The NCP system, on the other hand, would be used reactively to deal with over 400 cameras across 21 sites monitoring over 100 devices. The key driver for the system would be the intercoms positioned at each device (of which more anon). In truth, the main objective was to provide as much integration and automation as possible to minimise the manual selection process when reacting to an incoming call.

The £3.2 million state-of-the-art National Car Parks-run Control Room monitors are capable of tracking possible or suspected criminals right across the city thanks to a 400-plus unit camera installation covering all main thoroughfares

Designers initially broke the system into five component parts, namely: signal transmission, display media (ie the monitor wall), control and switching, the recording platform and integration. With analogue technology such as CRT monitors and VCRs coming to the end of their life-cycle and the proliferation of digital technologies proceeding apace, the necessity for long operating life hinted at a digital solution. Further to this, the traditional design of individual CRT monitors displaying single monitors was challenged, with the concept of using large projection displays to provide dynamic switching of virtual monitor sizes.

Another aspect of the design was to provide an intuitive human control interface. The lists of sites and camera numbers would be replaced by symbolic, two-dimensional, graphic-based control screens. To enhance the interface still further, system control was to be affected by touch-screen interfaces in place of mouse or keyboards.

Given the large number and variety of signals that needed to be moved from the edge to the centre, the only option was a fibre-based transmission system that would carry video, data, audio and network traffic. The recording platform posed a number of issues, including recording at the edge or in the centre.

Since the aforementioned retention policy of up to 92 days would require 50 terabytes of memory (storing three billion images), a robust centralised-style system was chosen. Judging by the scale of the platform, it's easy to see how the solution became something of an IT project as opposed to traditional CCTV design.

Merging IT with security
Following consultation with a number of the incumbent telecommunications providers in the Manchester area, a deal was reached with one of them to provide a diverse ring of fibre around all the proposed sites. Six fibres (three in each direction) were subsequently provided from each location back to the Control Room. Neil Robson – NCP's engineering project manager – added: "The fibres were installed in a ring to enable the signals to be transmitted in the opposite direction in the event of any damage to the fibre network."

To support immediate and long-term requirements, both analogue and digital networks have been installed. The video, audio and data is transmitted on the analogue circuits, while PC/IP-based equipment is installed on the Wide Area Network.

In terms of the monitor wall, the main design requirement was for a dynamic visual interface for the operators. A high resolution projection system was needed, and Robson and his team chose the Barco Hydra offering. Normally used for large-scale traffic management Control Rooms and broadcast studios, this quite excellent system enables anything from one to 30 images to be displayed on a single 84" screen in real time and at high resolution.

You'll be thinking that there must be a high capital cost there. Indeed there is, but relatively low running costs combined with an easy upgrade path will offer considerable savings over the project's lifetime.

At the heart of the system is the control and switching matrix. A scalable product was needed, and Synectics delivered. Seen as the ideal project partner by Neil Robson – "They've over 100 town centre installations to their name" – the company's experience in providing interfaces to various manufacturers' telemetry equipment proved invaluable. Not least when the existing Manchester City Council cameras (79 of them in all) had to be moved and 'plugged in' to the new set-up.

The £3.2 million state-of-the-art National Car Parks-run Control Room monitors are capable of tracking possible or suspected criminals right across the city thanks to a 400-plus unit camera installation covering all main thoroughfares

The Control Room: how it works
"The 18-metre monitor wall consists of 162 monitors with 412 camera feeds, offering a possible combination of 164,000 differing camera displays," states Robson. Dynamic switching between scenes is driven by a Graphical User Interface, which allows display in a variety of different formats (ie full screen, two-by-two, four-by-four and polo). Polo (see the photograph above) allows a larger screen to be displayed in the centre and cameras related to that camera displayed in relation to it.

Another feature of the dynamic switching is the use of 'macros'. For example, if a particular area is used routinely then these can be retrieved at the press of a button. This is particularly useful at night for monitoring taxi ranks and fast food restaurants, etc. "These are traditional and predictable 'flash points'," adds Neil Robson, "so their routine monitoring is both prudent and necessary".

To co-ordinate the retail crime operation – also sponsored by Manchester City Council – two radio systems are in operation. The first of these, StoreNet, links the Control Room with over 180 retail outlets in the city centre (thus enabling retail thieves to be arrested by co-ordinating store detectives from different stores to assist each other). The second system, designated NiteNet, links over 80 pubs and nightclubs and allows the Control Room and Greater Manchester Police to be alerted of drunken or violent behaviour at an early stage.

The car parking operation is the culminating point of a seven-and-a-half kilometre dark fibre optic ring. At present this links 19 car parks around the city (soon to be 21) by the use of car park machinery which is capable of interrogating the system at the remote sites (see 'Effective communication: integrating CCTV and audio via a dedicated intercom').

"The use of 'virtual maps' allows us to drill down from a map of the city to an individual car park and different levels on that car park where appropriate," stresses Robson. "Intercom calls which come in from the remote sites automatically switch a picture from the camera related to the intercom used to the spot monitor of the operator so that the nature of the problem may be seen as well as heard."

Although all of the cameras are recording constantly they are doing so at different rates. Everything displayed on the spot monitors is recorded at 25 frames per second – ie broadcast quality – while all other camera images are recorded at a rate of two frames per second for the Council cameras and one frame per second for the NCP cameras.

Of course, all the information in the world is of no use if it cannot be retrieved. In practice, this is carried out using the Review Client. This is an easy-to-operate system which allows the retrieval of images that are up to 92 days old (in the case of Manchester City Council images) and 31 days for the NCP pictures. The system is operated by typing in the day, date, camera, reason for retrieval and duration of image required and then pressing the retrieve image. It then finds the image and determines whether or not it has been tampered with.

For end users, one of the great advantages of having a digital platform is that new technologies may be bolted onto it. An immediate example of this is the use of ANPR and facial recognition, but new and emerging software developments enable an almost limitless expansion of its capabilities.

The Combined Equipment Room
The Combined Equipment Room is effectively the 'engine room' which drives the Control Room downstairs. Images from the Manchester City Council cameras are fed in over dedicated BT comms lines.

The images are converted from analogue to digital signals and then passed through ingest servers – or 'chunkers' – which make the almost infinite number of zeros and ones into an easily readable code for the computer. This is essentially to allow the information to be retrieved. The information is then stored on five hard drives to prevent its inadvertent loss for 48 hours. This is called the RAID memory, and allows instant retrieval for the first 48 hours of its life. When all's said and done, that's the most likely period when information will be requested.