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Remote video surveillance

Offers cost, efficiency benefits

South African organisations are starting to migrate towards low bit-rate video surveillance products that have turned remote and centralised video surveillance across the corporate wide area network (WAN) into an affordable and practical reality.

That is the word from Mark Chertkow, managing director of Graphic Image Technologies, local distributor of the SerVision video monitoring systems. He says that South African companies are moving towards such solutions because they offer significant cost and productivity benefits.

"CCTV surveillance video was typically run on a separate network or over ISDN in the past, as it tends to interfere with normal data traffic by causing data and transaction loss. However, more companies are now adopting solutions that allow them to leverage the existing WAN infrastructure without the historical drawbacks of such an approach, which means that there are no additional monthly costs for remote surveillance," Chertkow says.

The SerVision product, for example, is a true narrowband solution capable of delivering video at rates from 6 Kbps to 2 Mbps. These systems allow operators to deliver up to 10 live video feeds over a standard 64 Kbps link, finally making centralised and remote monitoring an affordable reality.

It becomes simple and affordable, for example, for a control room in Johannesburg to watch over video feeds from Sandton, Durban, Pretoria and Cape Town. The value proposition of centralised, off-site monitoring includes saving on control room staff and better facilities management.

"These state-of-the art mobile video CCTV monitoring solutions really do take the security industry into its next phase. Apart from standard Diginet links, companies that use this technology can access remote CCTV video monitoring over cellphone (GPRS or 3G), ADSL, MyWireless or any other IP-based WAN link," says Chertkow.

Benefits associated with remote monitoring include alarm verification, improved productivity, improved security management as well as improved management of armed response services. By allowing management to access remote sites on alarm, CCTV becomes a proactive response tool instead of a post event investigative solution.

"With realtime access to CCTV video motion detection (VMD) signalling and video streaming via PDA, cellphone and PC, one can accurately verify images and data immediately, ensuring that you do not waste time responding to false alarms - which account for over 90% of alarms," notes Chertkow.

Chertkow points out that this technology has already been used for a range of applications in South Africa and other parts of the world. A major bank in South Africa has already tested the SerVision SVG400 on its 64k WAN infrastructure and approved its use in a shared-data environment.

SerVision's SVG1000- 16 channel video monitoring system is also being used by European observers and Israeli security officers to monitor border crossings at the Rafah border crossing between the Palestinian Authority controlled Gaza and Egypt.

European Union monitors who, under the command of Italian Major-General Pietro Pistolese, will oversee security at the border crossing on SerVision's realtime advanced and fully integrated video monitoring systems. In addition, Israeli security officers will be closely monitoring who and what goes back and forth across this border via a live video-link from a nearby control post in southern Israel.

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