South Africa’s first ever fully digital city surveillance system was commissioned and handed over to the Mogalakwena Municipality during February.
At its formal launch in early March, the Mayor, Cllr M.B. Mmola and Police Commissioner M.J. Mulaudzi praised the short-term success of this project and reported crime statistics that showed a reduction in crime in comparison to the previous year. Reduction in car theft, car hijacking, street crime and hawker nuisance were recorded.
Installation
Static cameras have been installed in the town museum, library municipal offices and stores. High-speed domes are installed on street corners as well as in the local township. Cameras are cabled back to the central control room via a fibre-optic network.
Sensor Security Technologies were responsible for the installation of the system, as well as the street poles and overhead fibre network around the town.
Ultrak KD6 Diamond domes were installed in the township and connected to high frequency radio transmission links on the top of 30 m poles and all signals transmitted over 8 km via radio frequency.
In excess of 28 cameras are distributed around the town. The central control room consists of 18 colour monitors, one 56" Plasma screen display with three operator positions all with keyboard controllers, and all occurrences are recorded on four Ultrak digital video recorders and over 500 MB of storage is available to manage archived image storage.
Intelligent management system
In addition, a management control station provides facilities for reviewing all stored information across a local area network with remote review of digital images. A colour printer facility is provided for hardcopy printing of crime events and video images are copied onto CD-ROM via CD-writer for later playback.
A Maxpro matrix switching system provides for total control and management of all cameras around the town. The Maxpro system is an intelligent exponentially expandable CCTV management system handling up to 10 000 cameras and is interfaced with five Quad video switches, four video distribution amplifiers, four digital video recorders bringing data back via a high frequency wireless telemetry and multimode optic fibre system. The alarm management of the remote sites is handled via an Adroit/scada software package.
When a remote site picks up an intrusion signal, this signal comes in with the camera image from that area. The operators can then make a decision on whether to dispatch a reaction unit to the site to investigate or not.
In addition, Adroit software provides for custom mapping of monitored areas. Furthermore, the council electrical and water substations, reservoirs are managed through this software with wireless Intrac telemetry equipment. This allows for remote switching of anything from flow switches to PLC's.
According to Sensor's Gary van Staden, the company intends to offer these facilities to other municipalities and councils.
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