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New technology to boost security at hospitals

Network video recorders, or NVRs, is a relatively new technology that will enhance hospital security personnel's ability to protect patients and staff, as well as minimise shrinkage and prevent theft.

NVRs record and replay simultaneously, and recordings on any one machine can be remotely viewed by a number of authorised operators spread across the network simultaneously, all totally independently and without affecting each other.

The beauty of this, explains Reditron managing director, John Loftus, is that the operator - using tools that already exist - can identify and replay events of interest from a recording.

"IndigoVision's 'Control Center' Video and Alarm Management software, for example, analyses movement in a scene and on command from an operator displays thumbnails on the screen that represent frames from recordings containing the specified movement. Clicking on one of the thumbnails then replays that section of video," he says.

"The system can search 24 hours of recorded video and display these thumbnails in just a few seconds. Changing the search variables allows the operator to sift through vast quantities of recorded material quickly and efficiently. Analytics software then searches for the events requested, allowing the operator to concentrate on more specialised and immediate tasks. These are not just features that benefit the user but they also help to reduce the overall demand on the network.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg - new developments that will enhance security at hospitals include software capable of motion detection (person or vehicle moving, say, from left to right across a scene), virtual tripwire (detection and alarm upon breach of a defined line), shape-based detection (vehicle), object tracking and theft detection (object removed from a busy scene).

"These analytics can be run in two modes: realtime within the IP transmitter/receiver at the camera, and post-processing on any operator's PC. The realtime mode allows the system to automatically identify events as they occur. Post processing allows operators to run many different scenarios on recorded video, for example looking for cars parked for more than two minutes. These two modes offer the best of both worlds, using analytics to identify events as they occur, and also providing advanced search tools for operators to analyse previous situations.

"It can be expected that huge productivity improvements will result from using analytics software during the searching of recorded material in post-event analysis, and for which the NVR is the key," Loftus concludes.

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