New surveillance technologies address CCTV's failings - 18/1/2012
According to the annual crime figures for 2010/2011 domestic burglaries rose 14% and violent crime rose 6% in the past year. On top of that we saw the shocking mass public disorder last summer, and with the London 2012 Olympic Games just around the corner, it is no wonder that effective security and surveillance is becoming increasingly high on the national agenda. However many current surveillance systems are failing.
The problem is that the visual quality of the footage they produce is often very poor, which makes identifying and prosecuting criminals problematic, even when their crimes have been recorded. This is expecially the case where these systems are run over wireless networks. Cambridge-based business and product innovation consultancy Plextek has come up with a number of advanced surveillance technologies to help address these issues and give the authorities a better chance of catching culprits and putting them behind bars. Current video surveillance techniques work well over wired networks, but wireless links add noise and latency that standard techniques such as H.264 and JPEG200 fail to cope with.
To solve this problem, Plextek has worked with customers to develop a simplified codec based on JPEG2000 that has lower computational complexity and lower power consumption than current systems, and which works well with the transmission imperfections inherent in wireless links. Over very low bandwidth links analogue video still provides superior performance and Plextek has developed methods that take advantage of the power savings from analogue processing and modulation whilst providing the flexibility of digital networking.
To improve performance still further, Plextek has developed a range of intelligent analysis techniques that can be embedded in an HD camera. These techniques extract the important visual information from the high quality source video and forward it to the system controller at a much lower bit rate than full HD. Consequently, these techniques allow the benefits of HD video to be obtained even when network bandwidth is limited.
Henk Koopmans, Head of Sales & Marketing at Plextek comments: “What’s the point of having CCTV in place if it fails to achieve its primary purpose? This would seem an obvious statement yet so many surveillance systems out there are recording footage that is failing to help the authorities identify the persons caught in the act, or worse still, being rejected by the courts as not providing the unequivocal proof needed to secure a conviction.
“An early arrest can save months of painstaking and time-consuming detective work. It also means our communities can feel a lot safer when the criminals are taken off the streets. With such rapid advances in video technology in consumer devices, we felt it was a travesty that surveillance images were still lagging so far behind and decided to put our significant in house image processing expertise to coming up with a solution. The technology and techniques we’ve developed will allow much clearer visual information to be garnered from surveillance cameras, resulting in higher rates of prosecution.”
A video demonstration of Plextek’s technologies can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkPm-SVx8VA
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