Digital Video Surveillance
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The best way for the West Midland police force to considerably advance the safety of citizens in Birmingham city centre was to fit the best technology available to them for a digital video surveillance system that instills a feeling of security to the people walking through the centre late at night or even during the day and are worried about bag snatchers.
Ensuring that the whole of Birmingham city centre had total digital video surveillance was not going to be an easy job, if you have ever seen the centre you would understand, there are lots of little black spots where originally there was no coverage whatsoever. It took a total of nine of Dedicated Micros BX2 video recorders, these are classed as the heavyweight in the industry, the BX2 is high performance, it has been developed to be versatile enough to handle variable event recording. All the recorders were mounted in a rack in the newly developed low temperature communications rooms in the town centre.
There are over fifty cameras placed in the city centre and the high quality images are all stored locally at the control room, around fifteen of the cameras are controlled locally by the BX2's and then we set up a matrix to control the other fourty or so cameras by connecting them to a fibre optic cable from british telecommunications, that was solely dedicated for this purpose only.
The low temperature room had to be totally rebuilt, the low temperature helps the servers run at their optimal capacity, the whole of the upheaval managed to happen just at the time when the war with Iraq was starting and people were really starting to worry more about their safety and were definitely more suspicious of people around them. When you think about the importance of video surveillance, then digital was the obvious choice, the amount of space and time and money spent on analogue is absolutely unbelievable, but when working on city centre security you will see that a lot of tape is being used but with digital you can store all the data that comes from the surveillance equipment directly to removeable hard drives so that the data can be accessed and removed at any time without any worrying of corrupting any data that is currently recording. the technology used in the development of the BX2 ensures that should there be a network failure that all of the information will still be recorded by each and every single camera and backed up on a secondary system.
The BX2 multiplexers also offer an internal CD-R, a maximum record rate of up to 50 pictures per second, variable per camera and advanced video motion detection facilities. There is a live feed with this system that means any major incident happening in the town centre, for example the football fans moving through town on derby day, can be monitored and should anything happen then the events can all be taken down for digital video evidence at the touch of a button and have real time recording of the events should they ever be needed.