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Walls have eyes!
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18/04/2008
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Greater emphasis on security – accompanied by advances in technology – is seeing more and more surveillance cameras being deployed. According to the latest official figures, the UK has 4.2million security cameras, but other estimates put this number much higher.
Digital technologies are key to this massive deployment, since the transport, monitoring and recording of the output of more than a very few analogue cameras is simply too expensive. Traditional cctv systems were expensive and bulky with limited capabilities for automation of the security function, thus requiring banks of monitors (and security officers) cycling through images from multiple cameras.
The surveillance problem can be described as a bandwidth limited network of sensors tasked with detecting brief events of interest (intrusions, accidents and criminal behaviour) and responding to them, against a background of entirely uninteresting footage. It’s similar to the ‘needle in a haystack’ analogy, but with the complication that you must watch the entire haystack at all times, because the needle could appear anywhere, including the location you just finished examining.
Digital video technology allows central monitoring nodes to process incoming images, automating some of the basic security functions such as detection and tracking of suspicious objects. This reduces the number of people required to cover a given number of inputs.
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Author
Anders Frederiksen
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