We seek to offer tenants protection from anti-social behaviour and vandalism. RedHand's ability to provide pictorial evidence of excellent quality via the Internet, makes VisionIP the obvious choice. This means that Housing Managers can control all their sites from one central location.
During the last two years RedHand has developed a new type of CCTV system, which has been designed to help Housing Associations combat crime and protect residents from the effects of vandalism and anti-social behaviour. |
The Issues:  Housing Associations have special challenges when it comes to ensuring the security and well being of their residents.
• How do they reassure residents who are often too scared of reprisals to make complaints
• If they install a CCTV system it must provide high quality images for evidential purposes
• They need a quick and simple method of obtaining evidence from a number of cameras - especially when the exact time of incident is not known.
• How can they capture evidence of the more uncommon events such as damage to resident's vehicles, street furniture and buildings by outside contractors such as refuse collection vehicles.
• Housing Associations often have to manage a number of sites from a central location, so need to keep any operational difficulties to a minimum.
The Solution:
RedHand VisionIP provides a simple and cost effective solution to these issues. The system is different from conventional CCTV as it works in a totally different way.
Conventional Tape Based Systems: Because a recorder can only record from one camera at a time, a multiplexer is employed which switches each camera in and out of circuit so that a short sequence is captured. This can compromise the image quality and cause the videotapes to degrade. It also takes time to search through tapes to find a particular event.
Digital Recorders: These employ digital camera technology whereby the image is split up into a number pixels, each of which contain their own colour and brightness information stored in a binary word. All this information for each pixel is transmitted at 20-30 frames per second. The amount of storage to retain all this information is vast, which makes it expensive. Often, the picture quality and size are reduced, in order to bring storage requirements to acceptable levels,
The RedHand approach: RedHand is part of Network Connections (UK) Ltd. - IT Consultants and Network Design specialists. Because of this we have been able to apply the "blank sheet of paper" technique to system design. It was immediately obvious that continuous video is not necessary, especially when one considers the disadvantages described above. What is absolutely necessary is image quality .
VisionIP uses digital cameras to take still photographs at the rate of 2 per second, and only whenever a camera is triggered by an event. This event can be either movement (Video Motion Detection), or by an external source such as a door/window/PIR contact etc. These pictures are then stored directly onto the hard disk of a PC. The clear advantage here is that, unlike conventional video, you will only view pictures when something is worth viewing.
Any number of cameras can be deployed, and they work asynchronously. When they have a picture to send, they send it straight away even if another camera is also sending pictures.
The key to the success of VisionIP is in the intelligent viewer, which enables historical pictures from any number of cameras to be viewed instantly. It is a simple operation to run a sequence from a date/time and a simple slide bar along the top enables the exact time to be found in a second or two. Because RedHand takes individual high quality snapshots (JPEG images), then each one can be date/time stamped. This means that the operator can ask the system to display all cameras that have been triggered between say 9.00pm last night and 7.00am this morning. This might result in say 4 cameras being displayed. These camera pictures are then locked together chronologically so it is possible to watch the whole scene as it took place.
Disk space requirements are very much smaller as we are only recording pictures at the rate of 2 per second. You can keep on line many days worth of pictures from many cameras on just a moderate sized disk. Two frames per second are perfectly adequate for capturing all human activity and overcome the disadvantages of video systems. Every picture is an excellent quality 572x704 colour JPEG image, which can be printed or E-Mailed. The Viewer Software will present you with just the right information you need in a very simple and uncomplicated way. RedHand has low network bandwidth impact with no picture degradation.
Live Pictures via the Internet: Because of the low bandwidth requirements an individual installation can be managed from a central location via the Internet. The Remote Viewer is the key to this, with the ability to open a layout of cameras. One layout could represent all the cameras associated with a particular block of flats, or you could have each entrance camera from every location. Instant live images can be viewed from any (or all) cameras. Unlike other remote viewing software the quality of the received image can be changed. The best quality will offer the slowest update (2 per second if only one camera is being viewed). Reduce the quality and the frame update goes up.
Note that the update speed is a function of the way that BT has rolled out ADSL. It does not matter what download speed is employed, as the upload speed is always 256Kbs. SDSL has been announced and will solve this problem, but it is currently very expensive. The important thing is that RedHand takes advantage of the available speed due to its low bandwidth needs.
Viewing Historical Pictures: Because RedHand operates on a standard PC, then remote controlling software such as VNC or Microsoft Remote Desktop Services can be employed. This means you can remotely control the PC, which is collecting the pictures, and run the viewer. Performance will be nearly the same as if you were operating the PC locally as the only information that is being transmitted through the Internet are the screen updates.
Copying to CD : Any sequence of pictures can be written to CD. The RedHand Viewer runtime files are also written to the CD, so that it may be handed to the Police, who can run the CD in any PC. The CD Viewer operates in synchronised mode so that the Police or the courts may see the whole event as it happened.
It is possible, using remote control, to make up the sequence of pictures for the CD and then copy those pictures back to the central PC and write to CD without even leaving your desk! |
