IT TRENDS
Internet-enabled surveillance
— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy
All-in-one seeing eye: eCon infotech’s integrated IP-camera-surveillance system.
The Olympic Games just ended, saw one of the largest deployments of public video surveillance in recent times. Chinese Internet solutions provider H3C Technologies worked with Beijing’s Public Transportation Group to monitor the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines as well as the special Olympic stadia bus lines — 10,000 monitoring points in all.
Back in India, many central and state agencies have begun harnessing video surveillance technology in the fight against terrorism. Delhi Police has put out a global call for technology harnessing Internet Protocol (IP) based video monitoring of key public places like markets and bus stations.
Bangalore which experienced a terrorist bomb episode recently has already created a TV camera-based monitoring system primarily for traffic management. Now it will be beefed up with another 500 cameras to keep track of suspicious activity at vulnerable public places.
And the Maharashtra government has decided to install similar systems at all entry points from the neighbouring states of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka... with the ability to peer into vehicles crossing border check posts.
Urgent item
Clearly, video surveillance has become an urgent item for law enforcement agencies — but a casual glance at media reports will show that most of the agencies still refer to the devices they are installing as CCTV — closed circuit television — a throwback to an earlier era when such surveillance was accomplished by rigging television cameras to banks of monitors and video recorders.
Today, all that is history. The science of visual surveillance has received its biggest technology fillip in decades from (what else!) the Internet, to be exact from Internet Protocol or IP-based systems.
The second is an efficient new algorithm for compressing video data known as H.264 or to give it the full title: MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC where AVC stands for Advanced Video Compression.
MPEG is Motion Picture Experts Group, a now obsolete expansion that has gone through iterations like MPEG-2, MPEG-etc. H.264 is an open standard that can reduce the size of a digital video file by more than 80 per cent compared with the predecessor Motion MPEG format, or 50 percent compared with MPEG-4 Part 2.
Lower bit rates
What this means in lay terms is that huge video sequences can be stored using much lower bit rates than was thought possible.
Without the huge efficiencies made possible by H.264, it would have been impossible to boot video surveillance technologies from the analogue to the digital era... or to exploit the huge networking opportunity provided by latching on to the Internet.
The combo of efficient compression and IP has done two things: It has unleashed the creativity of developers, many of them Indian, who today offer some compelling video surveillance technologies that are already fuelling many global applications.
In a recent product showcase in Bangalore one saw Ittiam Systems harness the superior bandwidth of Texas Instruments’ Da Vinci-HD ( for high definition) digital signal processing chip, DM6467, to split its capacity and fuel four video streams instead of one. In effect, Ittiam had created a 4-channel video surveillance system using a single chip. Indian engineers at Freescale Semiconductors have helped their own chip for video IP applications based on the ARM core.
The chip is said to offer a significantly cost effective solution... something that the Gurgaon-based e-Con Infotech has harnessed to an extremely handy 1-channel video camera solution where the electronics have all been squeezed into the camera housing.
Ever since it launched the world’s first network camera for the Internet Protocol in 1996, Axis Communications has created a niche for itself in the IP video surveillance business.
The company has installed over a million cameras worldwide and has created a single chip solution for network video functions. The Ahmedabad-based eInfochips offers a couple of design cores which will help developers working on video surveillance chips to sharply cut the design cycle and cost.
The cores comply with the standards that need to be followed if such chips are to find global markets. The availability of such building blocks is likely to accelerate the transition of video surveillance from a costly tool for governments and public agencies to a mass consumer thing.
To defend themselves
Individual home owners feel increasingly vulnerable and are embracing all the technology they can find to protect and defend themselves.
The Singapore-based security systems company Innotec Solutions recently launched what it called ‘the world’s smallest recordable security camera system’ for the home, Inno-cam.Fix the tiny camera over your door, link it to a PC and it will maintain a record of everything in its field of vision, triggering an alarm when there is motion of some kind.
The beauty of the offering is in its simplicity. You can buy the system complete with software on a CD in Singapore stores Rs 3,200 approximately. It gives you access to a special web page maintained for you, from where you can check on the images captured by the camera.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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