Feature

CCTV

The Evidence is in the detail

 

Visimetrics is headquartered in Ayrshire in Scotland and their mission is to bring the enormous advantages of digital imaging technology to CCTV and video surveillance users through the continued development of high-performance capture, storage and management systems. It is fundamental to the company’s design philosophy that systems should be simple to operate and install. The company’s technology is further designed to optimise automation to improve the overall performance of the system and provide the highest quality images for rapid retrieval and evidential purposes. Visimetrics achieves this through inherent skills and experience within the combined disciplines of hardware and software engineering as demonstrated in the flagship FASTAR DVR, which sets the standard for performance and efficiency in the high-end DVR market.

We decided to take a closer look at why Visimetrics’ technology is the preferred choice when it comes to ‘observation critical applications’ such a police forces and prisons.

Complex
Craig Howie, commercial director of Visimetrics says: “Many end users find the progression to a networked CCTV system complex and challenging, especially from an IT point of view. Many of the problems associated with providing extended storage systems in video surveillance applications unfortunately stem from certain assumptions or lack of technical knowledge of the solutions available and the underlying benefits of each solution.

“CCTV systems are – typically – specified by resolution, frame rate and storage period, without mention of image quality, bitrates or throughput. When tenders and specifications provide such a simple set of requirements then extended storage systems becomes no more than a means of providing the required capacity or if a requirement of RAID is made within the specification, it becomes a means of providing the capacity using a stated level of RAID – no more. It is hence, imperative that you look at the capabilities of various forms of extended storage and why some are more relevant to the write intensive usage of video surveillance than others. As the flexibility of extended storage increases and the use of video management software operating on extended storage systems increases then the distinct flavours of extended storage and how they impact the long term storage, retrieval and export of high data volumes of video surveillance will become essential to SI’s and Users alike.”

Next step – Forensic Video Analytics
Video management software – and soon also forensic video analytics software – which can help search for certain distinct features in stored images such as a logo on a shirt worn by a perpetrator, a specific colour of jacket or other characteristics, will require that the stored image quality must be high to allow for spotting and tracing such details. 

Craig Howie explains: “As the demand for storing evidence over longer periods of time continues to increase – 90 days is typical for observation critical applications such as police stations for example – the efficiency of how to easily retrieve the relevant images will increasingly become a focal point. Today, most of the forensic search for images relevant to a particular scenario/case is done by humans physically looking through hundreds or thousands of hours of recorded images in the hope they find something relevant. Shortly, most of this job can be undertaken by software tools which will allow for better and more efficient use of manpower. The reason most often cited for choosing our technology – especially for applications such as police stations – is the high level of detail we provide in the stored images. For these types of applications there is little point of storing images if they can not be used for evidence either in court or to solve a dispute. Our technology caters for showing, for example, the value of a pound note handed over at the custody desk. Our technology already stores the images in such a high resolution with a level of detail which makes them suitable for forensic video analytics software, for example.”

Rare breed
Visimetrics FASTAR is one of a very rare breed of digital video and audio recording systems that utilises individual hardware compression per channel to create full-frame, D1 resolution video evidence with fully lip-synchronised audio. Providing hardware compression ensures that every detail of every scene and every frame is captured and stored just for that eventuality. It’s the surety that you hold the detail necessary to close down any form of allegation promptly thereby saving time, resource and costs swiftly. Supplementing the video capability on FASTAR is the fully integrated stereo audio recording which intrinsically links the audio and video – a defining feature of the performance at the highest level of surveillance recording. This is why over 30 per cent of UK police forces and 70 per cent of HMP Prisons today use Visimetrics DVR solutions.

Web: www.visimetrics.com

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