printer friendly version

New technology to boost security at hospitals

Most hospitals in South Africa are public places with a high number of daily visitors. The large numbers of visitors, patients and employees provides perfect cover for criminal activity.

In addition, many large hospitals have their own laboratories which offer rich pickings to the thief in search of anything from high-tech equipment, to dangerous or controlled drugs, to years of painstaking research effort.

The solution to minimising the threat to staff and patients, as well as reducing theft, is the implementation of an efficient CCTV system utilising two of the most recent advances in the security field - analytics and network video recorders (NVRs).

IndigoVision's analytics algorithms provide users with powerful tools to assist in the complex task of security monitoring and control and are the natural, progressive choice for any serious, efficient CCTV monitoring system.

Features included in IndigoVision's product are congestion detection, motion detection and theft detection.

Congestion detection is used to alert a user in the event of a build-up of congestion in an area of interest, such as a public place, and helps to initiate timely action and prevent an undesirable situation from worsening.

Motion detection can be used to alert security personnel of unauthorised entry. The system can be programmed to define specific areas of interest in a scene and search automatically through a recording to identify and view any significant motion that occurred during the recording. This is hugely useful when searching for events in corridors, staircases, walkways etc. It can be tuned using parameters such as object, size and sensitivity.

The theft detection mode detects theft by 'locking on' to items of value or sensitive nature; if they are moved, the alarm is triggered. The sensitivity of this mode is highly configurable so that objects in the foreground of that defined by the system will be 'ignored' if they are moved or approached. This feature is also very helpful when reviewing recording footage, for example, a stockroom, laboratory or warehouse. It can identify when a particular item was moved or removed from a scene, in an instant.

'Control Center', the name of IndigoVision's enterprise video and alarm management software, will also allow operations staff in a control room to view live and recorded video from any installed cameras. All video is recorded on two NVRs, providing up to 14 days of continuous realtime recording. Operations staff can also run the same analytics on the recorded video for post event analysis.

The software 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. By clicking on one of the thumbnails a specific section of the video can then be replayed.

Share this article:

Further reading: