Rhyco Risk Projects recently held a series of events to highlight its remote monitoring solution, run on the back of Spectator Video’s management platform.
Rhyco is a consulting and electronic security systems integrator, with a history of delivering security services in South Africa. The launch of its remote monitoring solution is the next step in the company’s goal of providing a full service to clients, from project planning through to integration, and now remote monitoring.
Gary Swart, marketing director at Rhyco, says the company is focused on taking responsibility for the full security solution its clients implement, even if Rhyco only provides a small part of the solution itself. It is for this reason it teamed up with Spectator and its ability to offer a single control room management platform.
Spectator Video Technology is based in the Netherlands and offers its Spectator Communication Platform (SCP) as a foundational video and alarm management system. Applications are developed to run on SCP, based on market needs. Currently, Spectator focuses on three verticals, security, healthcare and communications, with multimedia services in the pipeline.
Gaston van der Broek, a director of Spectator, was at the launch to highlight some of the benefits of the platform. His primary message was that Spectator offers a complete solution in one package that is designed for ease of use, but at the same time to offer a solution that manages security services from alarm to resolution.
Van Der Broek says Spectator offers a multi-disciplinary and multi-protocol central alarm monitoring solution, which means it can communicate with almost any product on the market. It also permits two-way communications with video streaming integration.
Operator’s console
The standard setup for Spectator, as is used in the Rhyco control room, sees three monitors per operator as well as a video wall for the whole control room to see. The three operator screens consist of an administration, video and mapping screen.
The administration screen controls what the operator does when an alarm is raised. The operator can accept the alarm and follow the workflow processes that are presented to him/her to resolve the issue, or reject it. Everything the operator does is recorded, this includes his acceptance or rejection of an alarm, the steps followed to resolve the issue, along with all notes made in the process, as well as recordings of text messages, emails and telephone calls to the relevant parties. This is all presented in an automatically generated report to provide a full accounting of each event to both the control room and the client.
The video screen contains the video surveillance of the event. When an alarm is raised on the video wall, an operator can pull the incident onto his own screen to deal with it, allowing other operators to continue their work. The video coverage of the event will also be stored and linked to the report, making for easier oversight or teaching after the fact.
The mapping screen contains a map of the area or the building, allowing the operator to see where the incident occurred and its potential impact on the surrounding area. In the event of multiple alarms at the same time, the system will queue them in order of priority to ensure the most important are dealt with first.
Spectator Video allows companies to create a workflow to follow for each incident, or multiple workflows depending on the situation. It calls these Action Plans. This is a flow chart presented to the operator to ensure they follow the correct procedures for each incident. The action plans will enable the service provider to ensure that it meets the requirements of its SLAs, and provide proof that each step was followed.
In some instances, a fourth screen can be added for companies who want to have mobile coverage, such as cameras in vehicles.
Bandwidth friendly
One of the primary benefits of Spectator Video is that it is designed to use minimal bandwidth in transferring video to control rooms. It does this via a protocol converter installed at the customer site which connects to the site’s video streams, converts it into a proprietary format and streams it back to the control centre using very little bandwidth.
Van Der Broek says that all current analogue video cameras are supported, as are most IP video cameras. If there is a need to support an IP camera that is not on the list, the company can quickly ascertain if it can be converted and make the changes necessary. This allows customers to use whatever video surveillance cameras they already have installed when adopting the service from Rhyco.
The low-bandwidth connection is bi-directional. This means that operators are able to hear and speak through onsite cameras if needed, and they have full control over cameras, such as PTZs, to allow for virtual patrols. Spectator also uses a technique called Galvanic Separation to ensure its streams are unhackable.
Apart from being able to stream high quality video over almost any connection, Spectator also provides DynDNS support. Using this server, clients do not need to have a fixed IP address, but will still be able to have their security installation monitored.
Video Content Analysis
Spectator also has a number of analytical applications available, including people counting, loitering, tailgating, camera tampering, tripwires and more. Different rules can be combined to develop an even better detection solution. The analytics does not happen in the control room, but on location. When an alarm is triggered, the event is sent to the control room from where the operators take over and manage it according to the Action Plan.
When an event is triggered, the operator can verify the problem using low-bandwidth streaming, and then switch to high-bandwidth streams for improved image quality.
Operational on four continents, Spectator Video has solutions in place covering the financial market including ATM protection, safe cities, industrial installations, retail, and home alarm and automation solutions.
For more information contact Rhyco Risk Projects, +27 (0)83 306 5499, [email protected], www.rhms.co.za
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