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CCTV delivers more than law enforcement

Standards-based Cape Metropole CCTV set-up grows, wins investment.

When the City of Cape Town announced the country’s first city centre surveillance installation using closed circuit TV in 1998, Fibre Based Integrations was instrumental in the set-up of the core transmission network using Teleste equipment to transmit the composite video signal back to the control room.

“Technology has changed and the installation has expanded since then,” says Andre Potgieter, owner of Fibre Based Integrations, sole local agent for Teleste video transmission and video management system. “But Fibre Based Integrations and Teleste have been there all along keeping up with the change in technology, going from point-to-point, to ATM, to 10GigE on the backbone.”

Ridwan Wagiet, director of the CCTV branch of the Cape Town Metropolitan Police, says in time, Cape Town wants to bring the entire Cape Town Metropole’s CBDs and public transport interchanges under 24-hour surveillance.

Mayor Dan Plato, deputy police chief Yolanda Faro, J P Smith Mayco member for Safety and security [behind photographer]

Law enforcement and much more

Wagiet says the City’s primary objective with surveillance was to aid law enforcement agencies in the execution of their duties, with up to 2000 incidents reported every month. “Today, however, it has a much wider application.”

He cites further uses as wide-ranging as: monitoring fires, protest marches and streets, for maintenance purposes. Clients include transport, traffic and emergency services or external entities like the Airports Company and the Local Organising Committee of the Soccer World Cup.

Many of these clients have shared feeds with the City or among themselves, he says. “The City may wish to monitor ACSA property for security, while ACSA may want to keep an eye on traffic on approach roads,” he explains.

City CCTV operators monitor city-wide feeds on behalf of various internal and external clients

IP-surveillance comes of age

Much has changed to enable such advanced applications as feed sharing, and to spur widespread adoption of what was a state-of-the art technology in 1998.

Wehan Wessels, principal consulting engineer on the City’s ongoing CCTV project and director of Transport Telematics Africa (the current consulting engineer), says back then the City had 12 analogue cameras. “They were transmitting extremely fibre-hungry video feeds over dedicated (point-to-point) analogue systems. The recording was tape driven and the older digital recorders delivered barely recognisable faces at poor resolution and at three frames per second.”

So what is different today? “Internet Protocol (IP)-based technology today offers standards-based video over 10 Gbps Metro Ethernet,” he says. “IP has many spin-offs, including pin-point camera and feed management, as well as rights-based sharing.”

The standards based Teleste VMXIP platform further allows for integration with other applications, such as recording or incident management, and allows the City to simply add on to the existing deployment as the CCTV network spreads throughout the city. Finally, the ability to run multiple feeds on one IP backbone, and the use of MPEG 4 video compression, have not only brought transmission costs down considerably, but also reduction in storage space on recording.

Challenges

Although this is an open ended project, with expansions continuously on the go, specific project timelines or scope of works, are determined by each individual contract, Wagiet explains. “It has been ongoing, with more projects coming on board all the time, so cost has been a concern. Our operational budget has swelled from R15 million in 1998 to R48 million today.”

One problem has been the escalating cost of paying for mostly imported equipment with a vulnerable currency.

“Furthermore, we use an open based tender system required by the Municipal Finance Management Act which results in new contractors being used all the time,” says Wagiet. “This conspires against achieving continuity. It has been a problem, but it has been resolved with Teleste’s use of open standards technology.”

The solution

Notwithstanding the challenges, the grand vision was to give the city access to next-generation IP video applications and flexibility, topped off with high quality audio, video and data.

The basis for this was a redundant dual ring of fibre, laid along the N2, N1 and the intersecting R300. “We have spent R8 million on our own fibre, which has the benefit of ownership and quick payback, even if the initial outlay is big,” says Wagiet. “About 100 cameras still run on rented Telkom fibre, an operational expense of R30 million over 10 years which will in time be eradicated.”

Two video control centres were set up (in the city and at N1 City), with access to each other’s feeds, pulled in from multiple nodes. If the link between the two goes down, they operate as standalone centres. Each has a main server with a backup server, which allows for receiving video feeds, and then switching them to decoders for viewing and 140 terabytes of RAID 5 storage for recording at 25fps, two CIF for 31 days.

“The client requested doubling the specification of recording for 2010, to around 300 TB,” says Wessels. “More cameras will be added, and we will be doubling the feed capacity and resolution of camera recording to 4 CIF.”

Paired control room operators view feeds in short shifts, remote-controlling cameras via the Teleste VMX head-end equipment. The centre runs 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days. As incidents are noted by an operator, a supervisor is notified. This incident is then passed on to the Metro Police and SAPS on hand, where it can be actioned.

Quantifying impact

Wagiet says it is difficult to quantify the impact on City operations, but says the City is broadly supportive of the many uses for CCTV, and has endorsed large-scale future expansion and upgrades as technology improves.

“We rate its success by the pace of development and investment in the city. If it is a safe place to be, there will be investment, and CCTV must take its place among all the other efforts to make the city a more attractive place.”

Project scope

By 2020, the Cape Town Metropole wants CCTV surveillance of all its CBDs (totalling 40) and public transport interchanges (200-plus taxi, bus and train hubs).

The city is currently still the SA leader in city CCTV. At the time of writing, the number of cameras under Fibre Based Integrations’ management numbered

287 with distributed recording and remote control room viewing. By 2015, 400 to 500 more could come on-stream.

The Teleste transmission platform further runs other leading SA city surveillance installations, namely Johannesburg, Pretoria, Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg, Polokwane, Durban, Mokopane City Centres, with a total of some 1100 cameras.

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