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