printer friendly version

The need for integrated control room displays

Display walls have been around for some years, often in high-tech utility control rooms such as power utilities and water suppliers, where the big picture of the grid is essential to the flow of operations, identification of issues, and problem resolution.

A large wall display allows the incorporation of different types and sources of information display in a common integrated view. They can display multiple input sources and allow analysis and delving into information with customisable, on-the-fly inputs and changes in the way they are displayed relative to one another. Most importantly, they enable viewing in context and enhance situational awareness – things can be related to each other and the whole to facilitate better judgement and decision-making.

Within a control room, they provide a common frame of reference, and common viewing allows joint verification of the inputs of different people and makes it harder to hide inappropriate activity – both externally to the control room as well as internally.

To see the CCTV

CCTV has related to the concept of display walls for some time, and in the earlier days of CCTV in the UK, it was quite common to have tens or even over a hundred CRT monitors up against a wall. Now, people just use large amounts of flat screens, or large displays with multiple camera views on the screen to get the same effects. Historically, the approach of many technical people seems to have been to display as many camera views as possible within a limited screen area.

Multiple camera views crammed onto a screen have been common since the use of 15-inch monitors and have only tended to increase with the current large-screen TV type displays. However, placing lots of monitors or even a few large screens against a wall is not what a display wall is all about.

For years, the CCTV industry has mentioned the integration of various kinds of technologies, the latest being around AI. Yet, from a viewing perspective, we still often have smaller consoles with fixed camera views on a set of monitors with little relationship to other technologies. Sometimes, there are huge numbers of camera views crammed on display screens, and camera views of a size that is almost impossible to notice anything of relevance, especially suspicious behaviour. In many cases the same camera views are displayed on the same console monitors day in and day out.

A key factor for control room operations in successful detection, response handling, and apprehension of suspects during incidents is evaluating things in context, and this is where integrated wall displays can shine. The identification of people of concern and picking up of early indicators is about how they stand out from normal conditions and create a sense of ambiguity or wrongness. Display walls provide a coordinated perspective that facilitates the ongoing feel for situations, assists in the coordination of resources to deal with the situation, and facilitates follow up by response personnel to apprehend suspects.

More integrated information

To potentially contribute to this, there are constant developments of new technologies and types of information that feature in control rooms. New types of camera imaging, drones, more sophisticated alarm processing, automated number-plate recognition, intelligence information, face recognition and comparison, social media inputs, more camera sources, including body-worn cameras and access control details, map display and plotting of key personnel and targets, and newsfeeds, are all streams of information coming into the control room that can be used for evaluating conditions and responding to threats.

One of the main thrusts of developers and suppliers of CCTV and control room technology has supposedly been the concepts of integration, carrying through from the actual equipment into the software capacity and ease of integrated use. Unfortunately, there are few examples of effective integration of these different functions into a common coordinated viewing display in the security industry – all too often there is a patchwork of poorly displayed different inputs on a number of different display screens against a wall.

Yet, I was provided with a video of a business meeting recently where the participants were using an interactive display wall with various types of information that could be highlighted, interrogated, and supplemented according to the discussion needs. It was almost the perfect kind of display that should be in a security control room.

Having a centralised display wall does not do away with having independent consoles – the point is to have important views or incident conditions picked up by the operator shown on the common wall display to provide an ongoing status of what is occurring in the operation. Operators at such consoles are important in filtering out less relevant information and picking up important views, which are then shared.

To make the viewing of monitors by operators effective, cameras need to be displayed at consoles on the basis of a risk evaluation of the operations. We need to optimise what camera views we are looking at, how they are displayed, and how we are looking at them. Not all camera views are equally important, or important at the same time, or even necessary to watch unless something is happening on them.

The monitors that are focused on by the operators and are cast to the central viewing platform of the wall display should be the most important and relevant to the current operational situation being experienced. If there is little happening, that in itself should be part of the message conveyed to the central wall display.

Awareness and access

If video footage or information on a potential or actual incident is sent in the event of an incident that needs handling, the control room supervisor or other controlling person should be able to call on the console operator for better views and perspectives on the emergency being faced and source information from other consoles that can assist. Alternatively, a console operator may be given a task to retrieve recorded footage for review of aspects raised during the live monitoring.

Given the increasing range of inputs coming into the control room, we need to recognise there are specialist functions that should have specialist operators – these are experts in analysing, filtering, and passing on information and responding directly to queries in the area. Drone operators, for example, are highly trained, and the function cannot just be allocated to a standard console. Intelligence and social media analysis does not have to be located in the control room, but important information coming out of it should be part of the central wall display.

Having multiple live sources of information means that the person responsible for coordinating and analysing the sources of information for the central wall display is always aware of the exact status of the operation they are working in, whether an incident is occurring or not. It also means that they are constantly reviewing the sources of information for quality, relevance, and meaningfulness and can review performance of operators within the control room and its service providers on an ongoing basis.

Better management and control

By using priority and pre-screening information cast onto a managed wall display, a coordinator can easily move and adjust the input to balance the needs of the situation currently being addressed. It may not be Minority Report equivalent at this stage, where you can control, pull and dispense with inputs using hand gestures, but one wants to head in that direction.

We need to move past the concept of having different consoles doing their own thing, to one where a focal central integrated wall display can give an instant status of the operations, developing or actual threats, and give a basis for immediately launching coordinated and integrated responses. All this integrated technology showing on a wall display, which is likely to include and be facilitated by AI, still needs a high-level person to act as an analyst, controller, communicator, and leader to drive the control room.

Craig Donald

About Craig Donald

Dr Craig Donald is a human factors specialist in security and CCTV. He is a director of Leaderware which provides instruments for the selection of CCTV operators, X-ray screeners and other security personnel in major operations around the world. He also runs CCTV Surveillance Skills and Body Language, and Advanced Surveillance Body Language courses for CCTV operators, supervisors and managers internationally, and consults on CCTV management. He can be contacted on +27 11 787 7811 or [email protected]

Share this article:

Further reading: