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System helps police watch CCTV in real-time
A SOPHISTICATED video system that transmits closed-circuit TV pictures from town centres to police headquarters is greatly assisting police officers on patrol in their work.
One police force in England – Dorset — is the first in the UK to use the technology that United States special forces in Iraq also used for the first time to send high quality, instant pictures to intelligence organisations in Washington over existing communications networks.
The technology, Blue Watch — developed by Essential Viewing, of Scotland — has enabled Dorset police force — a leader in the technological approach to policing — to send images directly into its control room from a number of towns and from the force helicopter as it attends incidents.
In the future it could be used to send images of incidents to police personnel on the beat, in a car or in a helicopter transmitting high resolution images to computer terminals, handheld computers or the next generation of Internet mobile phones.
Harry Brightwell, the head of information systems with Dorset police force, said: “The sophisticated compression system has allowed us to use our existing networks to transmit pictures of high quality. Until this breakthrough the only way to accomplish this would have been to install dedicated video networks and that would have been prohibitively expensive.
“In the future it will be important to send visual images of incidents that have come into the control room out to officers so that they can view the event and have an understanding of the event before they even arrive so that they can plan how to deal with the situation,” he added.
Essential Viewing’s advanced video compression technology allows a high quality CCTV image to be transmitted across a very narrow bandwidth in real time over existing networks or by radio. Because the narrow bandwidth networks already exist, they provide every single police station in Dorset county with data and telephony links.
The Blue Watch system has been built around real-time video architecture. A single network encoder is installed and connected to each local authority CCTV control room. When an operator is in touch with the police control room staff they can select the relevant camera feed and the network encoder to compress the video stream in real time.
Each encoder then sends a compressed stream across the existing wide-area network (WAN) to a network server located at Winfrith. Control room operators are able to connect to this server and view the appropriate stream giving them real-time access to each town’s CCTV system.
The key benefit of the system is that it can deliver 25 frames per second video steams over the existing corporate network in fewer than 150kbps or, of course, over a DSL line. Full-screen display is also achieved meaning that for the first time, high-quality CCTV can be transported using existing narrowband networks.
The chief executive officer of the company Simon Hardy said: “This is going to revolutionize policing in this country because there are a variety of ways in which the technology can help law enforcement. We have even developed a remote camera which is the size of a cigarette packet that can transmit pictures to a police control room achieving high quality images even over a cellular network.
“This technology really is a huge advance on traditional systems and fundamentally changes the economics of wide-area CCTV. It is also a very complete system as it also allows forwarding to any desktop and to officers on the beat using wireless equipment,” he added. — LPS/Dawn Feature
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