Digital video specialist Oliver Vellacott investigates a sea change that appears to be occurring in public attitudes towards camera-based surveillance.
It's NOW true to say that society is demonstrating a subtle shift in opinion with respect to CCTV surveillance. Orwellian predictions of Big Brother have never found much resonance with the public as a whole, but we may be about to see any lingering suspicion swept away by an active acceptance – even an insistence – that digital video surveillance has a vital role to play in ensuring a safer society.

Last September's terrorist outrages and the subsequent threats of biological attacks have done much to influence the way in which society views security surveillance. Ambivalence is being replaced by positive feelings of solace. In a fundamental shift of emphasis, the Big Brother who watches us – albeit benignly – is about to become the Big Mother who watches over us.

Several UK-wide studies have underpinned this view, with greater evidence of the effectiveness of surveillance. Town centre businesses and stakeholders nationally have identified CCTV as being more important than any other element of crime prevention – including greater numbers of police on the beat.

Only recently, an independent assessment in one English town showed that a new surveillance scheme had reduced crime by 49%.

Digitally-networked surveillance
We are now hearing ever-increasing support for the universal introduction of digitally-networked surveillance systems. Systems that monitor and record high quality video from an unlimited number of cameras, and that use intelligent applications such as facial recognition to safeguard our towns and cities.

And what about the biometrics programs that secure our airport check-ins? Now, these are being discussed not as the reluctant price of a safe democracy, but as an essential security umbrella.

And, in the wake of 11 September 2001, the ability of digital technology to slash the time needed to painstakingly analyse video evidence is being seen as an urgent necessity in pursuing society's guilty parties.

The fact that most current CCTV system designs are still based on analogue technology (with it's all-too-common shortcomings in scale, quality and management) has raised many uncomfortable 'what ifs?' What if, for example, Boston's Logan Airport had – like that in Brussels – been networked with digital video? What if the digital feed had been interpreted automatically (and in real time) by a national security agency?

We will soon see a radical change in the status of capabilities such as the digital screening of passengers at check-in and prior to boarding, and live air-to-ground digital video feeds from inside aircraft

In some respects, the 'what ifs?' are almost too painful to contemplate. That said, steps that the public may once have tolerated they will soon begin to demand. Inevitably, we will see a radical change in the status of capabilities such as the digital screening of passengers at check-in and prior to boarding, and live air-to-ground digital video feeds from inside aircraft. Products that have thus far been technology-driven will now be driven by the end user marketplace.

The existence of proven international reference sites will only accelerate this process. Brussels International Airport boasts a 700-camera system which, besides being the world's largest and most advanced 'video-over-IP' system, records continuous, crystal clear video from every camera and provides access to airport operations and external agencies – from baggage handling to customs, fire, police and security.

Such levels of sophistication take security and monitoring way beyond even the present generation of hybrid analogue/digital systems – and will also take the fight against terrorism to new levels of effectiveness into the bargain.

Implementing Big Mother
At IndigoVision, we regard our research and development work with leading CCTV manufacturers – Panasonic, Baxall and Ultrak among them – as something of a seven-year 'proving ground' that enables the new concept of Big Mother to be implemented now. Indeed, the concept has already begun in high risk environments that require surveillance, monitoring, real time analysis and/or recording. Witness the recent digital video network that was used to great effect in policing the G8 Summit in Genoa, and as part of several prosecution cases.

More importantly, perhaps, the technology has also been a key feature in the Ground Zero operation that is still taking place in New York. Embedded in the cameras carried by remote search robots during the rescue operation, its video footage was of such quality it was later broadcast on American TV news networks. Reassuringly, the self-same technology is in protective use now on the new JFK-Manhattan light railway.

Perhaps one of the truest embodiments of the new Big Mother perception is the way digital networked video has contributed to improved community relations and local democracy – the very rights that any security installation seeks to preserve. In Hull, for example, recent studies have shown that digital CCTV is having a positive impact on the regeneration of a large inner city area. CCTV installations pioneered by the Goodwin Resource Centre Association have halved reported crime on the troublesome Thornton Estate ('Caught in the Net', SMT, February 2001, pp28-29).

Meanwhile, in France (at Cogema-La Hague, a major nuclear fuel reprocessing plant) the 24-hours-per-day, 365-days-per-year 'always on' digital CCTV network allows the public to view cameras around the facility over the World Wide Web. This provides a comfort zone, not to mention a virtual 'open door' for public education and reassurance.

Open for business: OCTV ‘goes live’ in Birmingham

Given the measured and tangible success of dedicated town centre CCTV surveillance schemes in recent times – not to mention the Government’s allocation of funds to purchase equipment as part of its Safer Towns initiative – it remains the case that many schemes don’t see the light of day. Installation costs, you see, are still extremely prohibitive for many local authority security managers to contemplate. The aggregated costs of installing an effective system include digging up roadways to lay the necessary cabling, on top of the actual costs of wiring, purchasing cameras, monitoring the stations, manpower and hardware. When these costs were added up and compared with the allocated budget under the Safer Towns initiative, more than 42,000 smaller communities in the UK found that their budgets didn’t stretch far enough to cover the costs involved in installing CCTV in their towns. The situation is now being eased somewhat thanks to a new breed of wireless surveillance schemes, one of which has just ‘gone live’ in Birmingham. The technology – dubbed Open Circuit Television, or OCTV – is being used in a six-month pilot scheme to monitor the city’s Ladywood and Edgbaston wards in a bid to reduce both street crime and anti-social behaviour. Results will then be fed back to the Home Office when the pilot scheme ends in July. If deemed a success, a permanent scheme will be put in place. In practice, images from the ten-camera scheme (supplied by Shawley) will be fed back to the Rose Road Police Station in Harborne over a mobile GSM network, or diverted to laptops in patrol cars. With no cabling necessary, the OCTV system will be cheaper and more convenient than a fixed-line system. Flexibility is the major factor, though, the technology creating a realm of opportunities for end users requiring temporary surveillance. Security managers tasked with safeguarding construction sites are an obvious target audience. The major partners in the Birmingham scheme – the City Council, the West Midlands Police, local retailers and the Calthorpe Estate – will all be hoping the scheme works out. If it does, the Birmingham pilot could prove to be a vital pointer for the large-scale town centre surveillance schemes of tomorrow. Only time will tell, as they say...

Surveillance on the network: the next step for IP video

A revolution is taking place in the SECURITY MARKETPLACE. TODAY, BANKS, RETAIL CENTRES AND A HOST OF OTHER COMMERCIAL organisations are increasingly integrating analogue CCTV video surveillance traffic, access control signals and alarms over one data network. What’s contributed to the trend? Simple. Security managers have come to recognise that the future of their business depends on the network. They understand, too, that those networks must provide instant access to remote sites, address real time incidents at ‘off’-hours and provide maximum coverage at any time. With the advance of IP digital video technology, both IT and security managers can now implement a truly converged solution that addresses these needs – while at the same time reducing network operating costs, protecting the network investment and minimising bandwidth demands. IP video in context: Motorola stakes its claim with RemoteVU Guardian IP video solutions must contain the intelligence to co-exist on the network with multiple IP devices that are performing data and voice tasks. One company that has been busy in this development area of late is Motorola. Better known, perhaps, for its flip-top mobile telephones, the company has set itself the task of delivering “the next generation of IP video solutions”. The immediate result is RemoteVU Guardian, a system that allows today’s security professionals to tie analogue security cameras to a LAN or WAN and receive (and store) critical information in real time. Interestingly for the end user, true IP multicasting allows multiple users to log-on and view images at a pre-determined speed using the same amount of bandwidth – regardless of the number of users. By supporting IP Multicast and Unicast on the same or multiple cameras, RemoteVU Guardian permits multiple users to log-on at the same time and view the same quality video. This would be critical in an emergency situation when multiple people must assess a given situation from dispersed geographic locations. There are additional benefits to be had by the end user with IP video. The better system platforms will combine individual video processors and network access device capabilities to convert analogue video traffic to digital. Such platforms are less susceptible to viruses.

Source

SMT

Postscript

Oliver Vellacott is chief executive officer and founder of IndigoVision