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High performance surveillance system from Cathexis

Cathexis Technologies, a supplier of digital surveillance systems to the international market, is expanding its product line to enable its systems integrator customers to address a greater range of market segments. To date, its market offering has been a wavelet compression-based system with a host of integrated features such as motion tracking, integrated video switcher and people counting. This system has been very successful in retail, mining, industrial sites and campuses throughout SA, Europe and North America, primarily as a result of its extensive network support infrastructure with facilities for central monitoring and remote health management. The new technology will expand system applicability to new vertical markets where realtime recording is a no-compromise requirement.

Cathexis' ongoing research and development effort has produced a video module that yields high resolution, full frame rate video recording per video input using MPEG-2 compression. Critically, this module also provides internal DMA channels for raw and luminance video data so that the full system functionality of advanced motion detection, which requires access to uncompressed luminance information, is preserved. This allows high performance realtime monitoring and recording with advanced motion detection and PTZ control that, unlike the so-called video-over-IP architectures, does not suffer from mid-process network transmission delays.

The module will initially be offered as an alternative with the current DSS-6000 digital surveillance product, increasing image recording performance from 100 frames per second over 16 channels to the ultimate 400 frames per second over 16 channels. This extends the system's applicability to situations requiring realtime-per-channel recording including street surveillance, casinos and others.

In response to market demand, Cathexis is also introducing a greatly simplified graphic user interface (GUI) for its surveillance system. The wealth of features available on the DSS-6000 naturally leads to a fairly complex user interface and this has been seen to be a barrier for operators requiring rapid access to information via an uncluttered user interface.

The simplified GUI will be marketed as the Stalker 4000 Lite. The well-known, full featured graphic interface (now on release 5039C3) will be marketed as the Stalker 5000 Professional. All marketable DSS-related graphic user interfaces will conform to the Stalker brand and be represented by the 'paw' logo.

As with the current product offering, all systems are highly scalable and expandable. Qualified systems integrators can assist the user to begin with an entry level system and upgrade to a high end system later. For example, a wavelet based unit can be upgraded to an MPEG-2 based system by changing one or more wavelet video modules for MPEG-2 modules. Upgrading from a Stalker 4000 to the Stalker 5000 is a simple matter of a licence change. Such versatility allows the systems integrator to tailor the system to meet the user's exact needs and budget constraints. The new technology brings greater expansion capabilities and will be a welcome product line extension for Cathexis' existing and future customers.

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