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UTC’s integrated video road show

UTC (United Technologies Corporation), held a road show for its customers and partners in Cape Town, Durban and Midrand earlier this year. The purpose of the road show was to provide a comprehensive overview of the company’s solutions and capabilities in the security market, with displays and presentations that focused on product lines for surveillance, fire, alarms and intrusion and access control.

Hi-Tech Security Solutions was invited to the Midrand event where we were given a brief introduction to some of the technology innovations the company was demonstrating. This article will focus on the surveillance solutions the company highlighted, while the other sectors of the security market are covered in the April issue of Hi-Tech Security Solutions, which will be distributed at the same time as the CCTV Handbook 2017.

UTC provides the full range of surveillance products, from networking and transmission solutions, through to a broad IP camera portfolio, including speciality cameras such as thermal and ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) devices. It also provides HD-TVI high­definition analogue cameras.

As would be expected from a serious surveillance operator, UTC also provides video analytics solutions. These include cross-line, face, intrusion and defocus detection, among others. There are also image enhancement functions, such as a defogging capability.

As with its full range of products, the company focuses on providing reliable and cost-effective software to enable its partners to integrate a range of products into its surveillance platforms, from third-party surveillance products to a host of additional security products. The goal is to allow for easy installation and management from a single console.

TruVision

TruVision is the brand name for UTC’s commercial line of recorders and management software for small to mid-range installations. The recorders offer users a unified interface and ease-of-use, which is standard across the range. The recorders are managed by TruVision Navigator and can be accessed via mobile devices with the TVRmobile application. For those companies wanting to integrate a complete security solution, the TruVision range offers integration capabilities with UTC’s ATS8600, TruPortal and Lenel OnGuard. Third-party integration is also available through UTC’s SDK (software development kit).

TruVision Navigator is the management software for the full TruVision range and is provided at no cost with the brand’s recorders. It offers a range of functions and benefits, including:

• Backward compatibility.

• Multi-screen display.

• Bandwidth optimisation.

• Digital zoom on live and playback.

• Tampering monitor.

• Client 360° camera dewarping.

• Graphical maps.

• Event monitoring.

The latest version of the software, version 7.0, adds to the list of features. Some of the key features of version 7 include:

• Intrusion events from recorders can be reported and searched for.

• USB joystick support.

• 4K resolution support.

• TruPortal integration.

• Logical view of device tree.

• IFS switches discovery.

TVRmobile is the application for smartphones and tablets. Some key features include:

• Connect either directly to DVR/NVR or to IP camera.

• Use the sub-stream for low bandwidth.

• Control relay outputs.

UltraView Enterprise

UltraView is the high-end surveillance solution from UTC. The UltraView Security Centre is an intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface) used to manage daily operations in a control room, including recording and managing surveillance tasks, and ensuring operators take the appropriate action when an alert is raised. It is scalable to any level to meet the needs of large, distributed organisations, and is open to allow for integration.

For example, the system is designed for reliability and continuous operations, and can handle up to 20 000 cameras. It runs on Windows or Linux platforms, and handles all the needed surveillance functions a platform should, from monitoring, storage, analytics, events and alarm management and so on.

The system runs a series of robust recorders complete with hot-swappable drives, redundant power and continuous health monitoring by the UltraView operating system.

For companies requiring analytical applications from third parties, UTC supplies a PDK (plug-in development kit) which allows these applications to perform at the same level as UTC’s analytics. With UTC ­cameras running analytics on the edge, system resources are conserved until an event occurs, at which time the event and associated video streams and metadata are stored together for easy access.

UltraView’s distributed architecture is designed to make the most of customers’ computing infrastructure by running the analytics on the camera, with more complex ‘multi-device analytics’ done on UltraView gateway subsystems, and the complex ‘big video’ forensic analytics handled at the server. This structure ensures the client’s resources are used to optimal efficiency.

For more information, contact UTC Fire & Security, +27 (0)11 579 7300, utcfs.ssa@fs.utc.com, www.utcfireandsecurity.com

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