Terror threat boosts security firm profits

Early warning

One of the key technologies now hitting the CCTV market is software that recognises unusual behaviour and alerts a security team.

Unusual behaviour can be some think like running in a shopping centre when everybody else is walking, or seeming to hang about in a area when everybody else is walking around.

In such systems, which are brought to the market by Havant-based Smart CCTV, the real time image is only flashed on the screen when the person’s behaviour is outside the computers parameters, allowing the CCTV operator to make a judgement call – whether to investigate further or not.

Managing Director Nick Hewitson said: “The technological development have been driven by the realisation that the way it has always been done isn’t very effective. People sitting in front of a screen lose the ability to concentrate if they are staring at the same boring screen all day. They don’t become very effective halfway through the day. Now technology has taken that weight from them.

‘Two years ago that technology wasn’t there.”.

But he insists the world is no more dangerous now that it was at the height of the IRA terror campaign.

Fear of terrorism means big moeny for secuirty firms, reports Jeremy Dunning.

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© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows

11 Megapixel Lumenera network cameras

Lumenera Corporation, a leading developer and manufacturer of high performance digital cameras and imaging solutions, today announced the release of the Le11059 series of 11 megapixel network cameras. Designed for higher-end security applications, this camera model is ideal for critical surveillance applications where intimate scene detail is required.

Streaming full 4008x2672 resolution at up to 5 frames per second, these cameras deliver outstanding picture quality and performance across a standard 10/100BaseT network interface. A large 35mm format CCD sensor is capable of scanning 2600+ lines of resolution using progressive scan technology –an ideal solution for capturing moving object across broad scenes. A larger SLR Canon Bayonet-Mount provides remote control of focus and iris through standard SLR lenses – offering excellent quality and range of focal lengths. This camera is available in both colour or monochrome and is offered with optional environmental enclosures.

“The new Le11059 camera series arms critical homeland security and ports of entry type applications with resolution and image detail not yet seen in the surveillance world,” stated Greg Bell, VP Business Development – Security Markets, Lumenera Corporation. “This cost-effective solution provides the equivalent of 32X the resolution of standard analog video, making it possible to replace multiple analog cameras with just one of Lumenera’s 11 megapixel cameras.”

Lumenera is pleased to announce that the Le11059 cameras are now shipping. Call you local Integrator or Distributor for pricing.

About Lumenera

Lumenera Corporation, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, is a leading developer and manufacturer of high performance digital cameras and custom imaging solutions. Lumenera cameras are used worldwide in a diverse range of industrial, scientific and security applications.

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© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows

The Advantages of using Smart CCTV Cameras over conventional solutions

Historically CCTV solutions have been implemented using simple analogue cameras. However all these systems have been limited in their effectiveness by 3 deficiencies in the technology.

Spatial Resolution

CCTV cameras have been based around the standard Broadcast specifications (PAL in Europe and NTSC in the USA). This gives a maximum spatial resolution of just under 800 x 600 pixels, which in many cases is enough to show that someone is committing a crime, but not enough resolution to be able to positively identify them. Research published by the Scarman Institute for the UK Home Office has shown that Criminals do not worry much about a CCTV camera, as they know it is ineffective.

Human Interface

Historically many CCTV solutions have been essentially a forensic tool; the video has been recorded but not monitored. This hopefully allows the system to go back after an incident has occurred to see what happens. However, the incident has occurred and therefore there is no element of crime prevention. Given the problems of spatial resolution along with the use of hooded tops, masks etc. it is very common for it to be impossible to recognise the perpetrator, thereby rending the system useless.

Some systems (especially those monitoring town centres) relay the information back to a Control Room. However in almost every case it is expected that one Security Officer has to watch many cameras, meaning that his attention to any camera is at best very limited and in reality non existent.

Inflexibility

The requirement to transmit live video to either a recorder or to a video wall has required fixed installations with very expensive installation costs. The actual cost of the camera is less than 5% of the total hardware and installation cost required to receive the data at the video monitor or DVR. The need for fixed cables has prevented the use of temporary cameras to monitor “hotspots” which can come and go very quickly as Police and Security Guard assets are deployed in response to the problems.

Recently the CCTV market has seen the introduction of new technologies that aim to overcome some or all of these deficiencies.

High Resolution Video over IP or Digital Video

By moving into the digital domain it is possible to circumvent the restrictions of the analogue TV specification, there are cameras out in the market, which have moved to spatial resolutions of 2000 x 1500 pixels, although the frame rate is lower. This increases the resolution by over 6 times against a PAL camera, but this technology fails to address the other 2 deficiencies. It should be noted however that most Video over IP cameras on the market today offer lower resolutions than standard analogue CCTV, they just make use of existing IT cabling infrastructure rather than the need to install dedicated analogue cables.

Behavioural Recognition Software or Video Content Analysis

Computer Science is now building algorithms, which will automatically monitor the incoming video and report only the unusual. This frees the security officer from having to monitor the mundane 99+% of incoming CCTV where nothing of interest is happening. He can then spend his time productively doing other jobs, in the knowledge that the system will alert him and deliver video to his desktop if and when he needs to react and make decisions. However while these algorithms can work on both PAL and High Resolution images the image analysis computer still requires all of the video feeds to be hardwired back to it, making it inflexible.

Smart CCTV Cameras

There is no reason why a camera should only be an image acquisition device; by building a microprocessor into the camera, Video Content analysis can take place locally without the need to transmit large packets of image data around from every camera. This means that video is only transmitted when required, from only one or two cameras in the system. The amount of data can be further reduced, Automatic Number Plate reading software (for example) in the camera would allow just a text string of the number plate (a few bytes of data) to be sent as opposed to complete images. By reducing the dataset it becomes possible to use radio frequency communications from Bluetooth through WiFi to Microwave and thereby remove the requirement to install cables.

This ability to release CCTV from the constraints of a fixed infrastructure allows the cost effective deployment of temporary surveillance of anti social and criminal hot spots, which if a fixed solution is installed tend to move around the corner. The use of Smart CCTV cameras will open up many new methods of dealing with criminal and anti social behavioural problems which have been impossible to solve until now.

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© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Nick Hewitson

Portsmouth City Council (Hampshire UK) trials Video Analytic solution from Smart CCTV

The Perceptrak™ system was put in as a trial to run alongside part of the existing system over a four-week period. In the area covered by the Portsmouth City Council control rooms, there are 142 cameras with live monitoring, only one of which is a static camera – the others are fully functional. There are three CCTV operators sharing 24 monitors. Perceptrak™ was run in the background monitoring some of those cameras that are not displayed to the operators until the alarm sounds.

The main questions Portsmouth CCTV wanted answered by the trial were:

How flexible was the system? and can it be used on any camera?

They discovered that because Perceptrak will interface with PAL specification analogue cameras it was extremely flexible and would work with all of their existing infrastructure

Ray Stead, Portsmouth’s CCTV Manager’s thoughts for someone else in charge of a public space CCTV system are:

If you are looking to implement a system to assist the CCTV operators to be more effective, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

Who is going to be responsible for managing the system and how are they going to do it?

and

How will the operators use the system? They are the key to any effective system and if they can’t understand or use the features of the system it will be a total waste of money.

Smart CCTV ensured that from the operator’s perspective everything remained the same as usual during the trial. There was no change to existing systems, but it gave Ray the opportunity to understand what additional benefit could come out of having Perceptrak involved. The important factor was that they could take the image from any camera and use the system to alert them to potential incidents – the operator still has to make the final decision to respond and if necessary call the police. The Hampshire Police’s policy is still that they will not respond to a technology-generated alarm unless it has visual, audio or zoning verification by an authorised person.

Portsmouth City Council’s CCTV control room acts as a filter to visual alarms, making the decision on who needs to be told. Ray continues: “Perceptrak allows us to monitor areas that we cannot justify monitoring live all the time and thereby improves our live monitoring across the city by the CCTV control room staff. For example, the operators might be watching the bars and clubs on a Friday evening as this is where there is the greatest potential for incidents to take place, while the Perceptrak system would be monitoring the quieter areas – for example car parks and shopping areas, etc.

Statistics are available on how many incidents are monitored by Portsmouth City Council’s control room, how many tapes are sent to Police, how many incidents the police respond to and how many arrests. “The trial was too short to tell results in these terms but it gave us a flavour of what we could expect to achieve – there was enough information to say ‘excellent’!”, says Ray.

Although Perceptrak can do the digital recording, in this instance, Ray Stead needed it to do only the processing of defined video feeds to support crime prevention and community safety.

For example if a particular car park was giving problems – the operator could specify that images from the two cameras capable of watching that car park were put through Perceptrak to provide alerts if unusual behaviour started to take place.

“The key is that it is flexible. It is another tool to help the monitoring process,” explains Ray. “The difference is that it tells you when something happens without you needing to watch those monitors all of the time.”

Ray is keen to explain that the system does so much more than video motion detection (VMD). Perceptrak™ can tell the shape, size, speed and character of things it is watching – it deals with behaviour recognition. During the trial, it was found that Perceptrak can even run on the fully functional cameras, something that video motion detection cannot cope with. It is a credit to the manufacturer and product designers that the product is robust enough to allow for movement and a level of inaccuracy and still yield results. “If we ‘grab’ the camera, Perceptrak stops, but give it a few moments and it starts up again. We have to get it into the home position, that is part of the operator training, and it will start up again,”

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© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows

Video Content Analysis, what is it and why would I want it?

What is Video Content Analysis?

There are a number of terms used in different industries and markets to describe Video Content Analysis:

Analytics
Behavior Recognition
Content Analysis
Concept Coding
Intelligent Video
Object Tracking
Smart CCTV

They all however describe the real time use of computer vision in a security environment to monitor the CCTV camera feeds and assist the guard in his or her decision making process.

The UK is the country with the most CCTV cameras deployed, with over 4 million in use. It’s claimed that if you walk through London you will be watched over 300 times, however this is clearly a misconception. While it is probably true that you will be in the field of view of a CCTV camera over 300 times during your walk through London it is certainly not true that you are observed that many times for number of reasons.

Firstly CCTV control rooms have fewer monitors than there are cameras, in many cases a number of cameras are sequentially displayed on a single monitor. If for example five cameras are fed into a single monitor which then you obviously have only a 20% chance of being viewed while in any individual cameras field of view.

Secondly the staff in the control room are often expected to deal with other issues as well as monitoring the CCTV. They will be responsible for issuing keys, badges and permits to both staff and visitors; they are also responsible for monitoring the access control and fire alarm systems, controlling radio communications with both their own foot patrols and possibly the local Police. In addition they will need to be away from their desks for breaks to visit the restrooms etc. During this time they are not monitoring the CCTV images.

Finally the design of CCTV control rooms expects the guard to watch a large number of monitors. According to ASIS International, a human can effectively watch 9-12 cameras for only 15 minutes. Security guard shifts are often 12 hours long so 11 hours and 45 minutes are ineffective monitoring. CCTV Today in November 2005 estimated that the probability of an event being recognised and acted upon if it was clearly in the view of a CCTV camera was less than 1 in 1000. CCTV has historically been a forensic tool not a real time crime prevention system.

The principal of Video Content analysis is to use computers to monitor all of the cameras all of the time and when something unusual happens to alert the security guard to it. For example in a retail shopping centre a person running is unusual. The system can detect that a persons running but is unable to differentiate between a benign event, a teenage girl running over to greet her boyfriend, or a criminal event where someone is running out of a shop with an armload of jeans. However if the running event is drawn to the security guard’s attention he is able to make that subjective decision easily and respond appropriately.

Why would I want to use Intelligent Video?

The following scenario is taken from a real test of a behavioural recognition system monitoring access to parked aircraft in the USA. It shows what the advantages of computer vision over human monitoring can be.

There are 8 cameras monitoring a road that passes through a tunnel, above which is an area where commercial aircraft are parked. The system was tasked with looking for cars that stopped under the bridge and people climbing up the slope towards the aircraft. Over 1 month the system reported almost 300 events where vehicles were seen stopping. 298 of these were originally classified as false alarms caused by normal traffic flow problems. One event was due to a “fender bender” accident and one to a breakdown. There were no attempts to approach the parked aircraft.

At first evaluation, it would seem that the value of the system was negligible, all it had produced were 298 false alarms out of 300 events. Previously the cameras were monitored by a guard on conventional CCTV monitors and no events at all had been reported in the month before. It was found that the 300 events would take the guard on average less than 30 seconds each to determine the risk.

So instead of employing staff 24 / 7 for 30 days to monitor the tunnel only two and a half hours man hours were required over the whole 30 day period.
In addition, in the previous month the guard reported no events, given that each of the 300 events reported by the system actually took place in the test month. It is probable that a similar number actually took place previously when the guard was supposed to be watching and he didn’t notice them. It is therefore highly likely that if someone had stopped a car briefly to allow a passenger to get out and approach the aircraft, the event would have been missed, while the Intelligent Video system would have caught it.

The “Smart” CCTV system had therefore raised the effectiveness of the monitoring from zero to 100% while reducing the operating costs from 720 man hours to 2.5 man hours of labour.

When the security manager looked at the cost effectiveness on this basis, he had no hesitation in purchasing a system.


Key issues to determine before looking at Video Content Analysis.

What are your operational requirements? As seen above, if it is to have a minimum number of false alarms then the human operator will be more effective, he failed to report any of the traffic events under the bridge, in fact he didn’t report anything at all, so his false alarm rate was zero.

What percentage of the cameras is best monitored by computer vision, and what percentage is better monitored by a human operator? In general, today computers do better on the cameras where nothing much happens (and therefore guards get bored) and people do better in busy scenarios where occlusion between people makes it hard for the software.

A good example is an embassy that has a back alley where no one ever goes. This is covered by a CCTV camera and this was the only camera out of about 50 that was implemented at the beginning. The embassy realised that no one paid attention to this camera because nothing ever happened but if someone was in the alley they really needed to know about it fast.

In the majority of applications today, only a percentage of the total number of the cameras are monitored by video content analysis, some are only recorded and some are monitored full time by the security staff. You need to determine what is the specific risk and the most appropriate method of monitoring for each point. Do the risks and scenarios change during the course of 24 hours?

Can you build upgradeability into your plans? In many cases the number of cameras monitored by the software increases as experience of the benefits is gained.



Video Content analysis is a tool that allows you to improve your operational effectiveness. It is not the “all seeing” Big Brother monitoring all activity.

It helps you spot the needle in the haystack; CCTV provides huge amounts of mostly irrelevant data. Video Content Analysis extracts information from that data.

It reduces your costs, manual monitoring is inconsistent and expensive.

It reduces your risk by moving away from the limited human attention span of less than twenty minutes, and screening all of the video streams in parallel.

It allows you to move from a forensic mindset of finding out what happened after the event has taken place towards real time analysis and decision making.

You do still need to employ professional security staff to make the decisions on the information presented to them in a sensible manner.

© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows

The Benefits and Pitfalls of using Megapixel IP CCTV

Introduction

The market for video over IP in the security arena has been slow to take off in the UK. Many CCTV professionals have felt that the quality of the data has been significantly worse than the pre existing Analogue systems.

Originally, CCTV video over IP was promoted on a cost saving basis in that the video data could be transmitted over the customers existing IT network infrastructure and thereby significantly reduce the cost of cabling.

At the same time the designers of IP cameras looked to see what the market was currently using. They focussed on the fact that analogue cameras output 25 frames per second and this data rate is thought by the CCTV market to be “real time” video. This was despite the fact that most video tape recorders were multiplexing the camera inputs so each camera was only recorded at a very few frames per second.

This basic misconception as to what the market really needed has led to a number of unfortunate trade offs.

Spatial Resolution
In order to keep the data bandwidth requirements low enough many video over IP cameras have been designed with CIF (320 pixels x 240 pixels) resolution. A PAL analogue camera has almost 480,000 pixels per frame while a CIF image consists of only 76800 pixels. It is immediately clear that the resolution of a CIF image is only 16% of that of the previous generation analogue systems, consequently with much worse quality.

Image Compression
Even with the data reduction created by reducing the spatial resolution the data bandwidth is still usually too high to implement a complete CCTV system using pre-existing IT infrastructure. To reduce the bandwidth requirement further the IP camera manufactures implemented video compression within the camera. Again many of them made an unfortunate decision and decided to use MPEG-4 as their compression method.

At first MPEG-4 looks to be a sensible choice. It is used in huge quantities to encode and decode DVDs and therefore the semiconductor technology was available and cheap. However MPEG-4 was designed to maximise the compression while offering a good image stream to the person watching the DVD. It does this by transmitting a full frame known as the I frame and then a series of partial images whose data is only what has changed since the last I frame. This series of changes might be up to 100 frames before the next I frame update.

The major problems with MPEG-4 are that you can only do check sums on the I frames to prove that no tampering has happened and that it is virtually impossible to do any video content analysis on an MPEG-4 stream because you need the whole of each frame to be able, for example, to track people successfully.

The Benefits of Megapixel cameras

The term Megapixel applies to cameras with a minimum of 1 million pixels although most Megapixel manufacturers start their ranges at 1280 x 1024 or 1.3 million pixels, which is almost three times the resolution of a PAL camera and seventeen times that of a CIF camera. This immediately gives a much better quality image for both forensic and legal purposes. There is little advantage of capturing the perpetrator of a crime at so poor a resolution that you are unable to identify him or her.

The Megapixel camera manufacturers also realised they to would have bandwidth problems and have solved it by moving away from the requirement to provide 25 frames per second video. On the basis that time lapse video of 2 to 5 frames a second was good enough when tape recorders were the only method of recoding; then higher resolution video at the same frame rate will improve the system not degrade it.

In addition many of them have implemented MJPEG as the compression algorithm, this transmits all of the compressed data every frame and therefore makes the camera much more compatible with future developments of behavioural recognition software.

The Pitfalls of Megapixel cameras

It is a truism of all computing, garbage in = garbage out. The resolution of any electro-optical system is made up of all of the components and is called the Modulation Transfer Frequency, normally referred to as the MTF. The MTF is specified as a number of line pairs per millimetre and if you remember the test card on your television it is a similar grid where you measure the ability to resolve black and white lines that get closer and closer together. The more line pairs the better the resolution.

Historically analogue CCTV cameras have worked with C or CS mount lenses. The MTF of these low quality glass lenses is usually slightly better than the MTF of a PAL resolution camera. Therefore, the camera limits the total MTF. With a CIF resolution camera it is possible to use an even cheaper plastic lens and still have the camera as the MTF limiting factor. However as soon as you increase the camera resolution to Megapixel quality, the MTF of a standard glass C / CS mount lens (let alone a plastic lens) becomes the limiting factor. You have to purchase high quality Megapixel lenses to work with Megapixel cameras to gain the benefit. Unfortunately these are more expensive due to smaller manufacturing batches at higher quality. It is however a waste of money to specify high-resolution cameras without specifying high-resolution optics.
Another lens problem is due to the fact that often Megapixel sensors are of 1 inch (or even more) format. Using a lens designed to work with a 2/3 inch or less sensor will clip the image resolution and often lead to a darkening towards the edges of the image.

We have seen implementations of Megapixel cameras where a highly inappropriate lens has been sold with the camera leading to the customer believing that the Megapixel camera gave no resolution benefit over his old PAL camera when a simple lens change gave him a much improved image.

Unless only a very few Megapixel cameras are going to be deployed the output data rate is sufficiently high that dedicated network infrastructure will be required and potentially more hard disk space will be required in order to store 31 days of video. However the cost of hard disk storage continues to fall so this is becoming less of a problem.

Conclusion

Megapixel cameras are not the solution to every problem. A door entry system monitored by a guard will be much more cost effective using a CIF and MPEG-4 camera. However where image quality is key to the operational requirements of the CCTV installation, the additional marginal cost in implementing Megapixel cameras in those locations which require them is small compared with the total cost of ownership of the CCTV system over its expected life.

© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows

Smart CCTV Supports Atkins Transport Systems on the M6

Smart CCTV Ltd supported Atkins Transport Systems in their FOND (Fibre Optic Network Detector) tests for the Highways Agency, on 05.09.2006. The test were conducted between Junctions 13 and 14 of the M6 North Bound.

We were involved in the final part of the test, the performance stage. We mounted a Vega Long Range camera on the top of a People Carrier and recorded number plates and images of vehicles traveling in the inside lane of the motorway.

We where able to read plates 35-40 metres away with-out having to add extra IR lighting. The only change we made to the camera was to fit a 50mm Mega Pixel lens.The images were used to check the information from the sensor and to find vehicles of interest on the recorded footage.

As you can see from the images below the weather conditions were very poor as the spray caused from vehicles passing, affecting the quality of the image. However the camera was able to read the plates on these images.

For more details please click on the links below:-
Vega Long Range: Click here
FOND Sensors: Click here

Smart CCTV Ltd: http://www.smartcctvltd.com
Atkins Transport Systems: http://www.atkinsglobal.com
QinetiQ: http://www.qinetiq.com
Highways Agency: http://www.highways.gov.uk

© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows

Risk-UK: Recognising number plates at 20 per second

Smart CCTV has announced a new, high resolution Vega camera for automatic number plate recognition (ANPR). The Vega Long Range is able to read number plates up to a maximum of 25 metres away, much further than previously achievable. It has a resolution of 1024 x 738 pixels and a powerful image processor that enables reading of up to 20 plates per second.

Manufactured by Tattile, the Vega Long Range is a smart camera system with built-in illumination and optical character recognition (OCR) software, encased in a waterproof, IP66 rated housing. No external PC is required for image processing. It comes complete with infra-red lighting that enables it to read number plates day or night, in direct sunlight, poorly lighted areas and in the dark.

With its low voltage and 8W power requirements the Vega Long Range can stand alone in any location, running on battery, solar or wind power. Nick Hewitson, managing director of Smart CCTV, said: “The Vega Long Range is ideal for free-flowing traffic scenarios, such as on motorways or slip-roads. If vehicles are traveling close together at around 70 mph, then you need a fast processor that can ‘pull’ that number plate in time.”

About Risk-UK
Risk UK is the UK's premier monthly security and business continuity publication. The magazine addresses all aspects of risk that are faced by today's business community, assisting those responsible for the security, safety and risk management of the UK's largest companies.

Areas covered by Risk UK are diverse, ranging from countering potential terrorist threats, through to preventing crime against the business and those within it, detecting espionage attempts, fire prevention, health and safety, business continuity, disaster recovery, data protection, insurance, eliminating breaches in legislation, avoiding litigation, etc.. http://www.risk-uk.com/

About Smart CCTV
Smart CCTV Ltd is a leading Value Added Reseller (VAR) of Video Analytic Solutions. Video Analytics is the technology where computer vision software is used to filter real time video streams from security and traffic management cameras, and to alert operations staff to potential incidents.

We add value by providing a comprehensive range of professional services to our customers. These include consultancy, system integration into existing operational environments, project implementation and training.
http://www.smartcctvltd.com

© Smart CCTV Limited 2006 – All right reserved. For more information on Smart CCTV Limited please visit our web site: www.smartcctvltd.com - Published by: Ross Burrows