Simon Nash, Sony European product manager: network video monitoring/CCTV, was in South Africa recently on a fact-finding mission, and also to launch Sony’s Intelligence message by holding three workshops across the country with Sony South Africa’s customers.
The group has launched a range of products that incorporate intelligent functionality. Nash explains Sony's Intelligence message:
"In terms of research, when we visit our customers, they talk about the competition, what is good and what is bad about their competitors' products, about features on our products and those of competitors and they talk to us about their needs. This information is then shared with our research and development teams in Japan and China - that way we are able to bring about new features and functionality in our products.
The intelligent products are very much a link between what we heard our customers talk about and the complaints they had about their traditional CCTV systems. One of the problems people had with the traditional CCTV systems was false alarms, whereby the control room receives information from a camera that there has been movement in a picture, for example, and when the guard investigates he finds that it was simply a tree that was moving outside and had been picked up by the camera.
What often happens with these false alarms is that they get ignored after a while as they are eventually all perceived as false alarms.
Intelligent motion detection is able to intelligently distinguish between environmental conditions, such as a train moving or a door moving, and actual movement of people. Traditionally, motion detection was done by comparing the current picture with the previous one and if there was a difference it amounted to motion, so the tree that moved was detected as motion. In intelligent motion detection, a patented algorithm is used to compare the 15 previous frames, allowing the camera to differentiate between actual movement and environmental movement.
There are many intelligent cameras on the market, but the intelligence is done centrally - either in the DPR or in the server. We do it in the camera itself and can then distribute the intelligence across the network. With other intelligent solutions, if a customer wants a block of technology that does intelligent motion detection, it would have to be installed on a server and all the cameras feed their IP information to that server. The amount of bandwidth used and the amount of traffic created this way is huge. With the Sony solution, the customer's limitations are considered and IP can be installed on the back of an existing infrastructure for economy of scale and another network does not have to be installed. If there is a network connection, a camera can be plugged into it. In our unique model, we do not put the intelligence centrally, but in the camera. This way, all the customer's cameras do not have to be intelligent, the customer can predetermine which cameras need intelligent functionality and the rest of them can be standard cameras.
Similarly, in the same camera we are able to do intelligent object detection - a patented technology that works by detecting a change in the picture information. For example, at an airport, if somebody abandons a bag then there is a potential security threat. Traditional analog CCTV cameras are not designed to identify such threats, they just send the information to the control room and the onus is on the operator to differentiate and possibly realise the potential threat. The intelligent functionality in the camera allows the camera to detect that something has been abandoned, thus identifying the threat. After a predefined period of time, which can be adjusted in the setup, the camera is able to send an alarm to the control room.
On the one end of the intelligent range we have the camera in which all the pre-analysis is done and on the back-end in our recording and monitoring packages, we are able to receive that information from as many cameras as the customer chooses to have on the system
People tend to think that the transition from analog to IP is a new transition. In reality, IP has been around for some eight years now. It started with an encoder, which was separate from the camera, the output from a traditional camera was plugged into the encoder and then added a network connection to the PCs. Sony has always integrated the encoder within the camera. I think most customers have been persuaded of the benefits of moving towards an IP solution and being able to use the existing IT infrastructure within a building. So the trend towards IP is not new, we are well on our way into the IP arena. And once customers are au fait with the IP world, they realise that the information collected by the cameras can be used for much more than just a security system, it can be used as effective marketing or business analysis tools as well."
For more information contact Will Klopper, Sony SA, +27 (0)11 690 3200, [email protected]
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