Visual matrix

By Jianggan Li | 23 December 2008 | Permanent link

When it comes to surveillance and monitoring, there is much talking about whether the operators are able to effectively detect unusual events and how much intelligent software is able to help them.

How to help? There is a prevalent focus on how software can take over the monitoring and alert the users when it detects something. Though many products have achieved amazing results in some aspects, the whole automation business is still quite buggy.

Wouldn’t it be better to empower the display system to interpret and visually represent all the information that a security professional needs to make a correct and INFORMED judgement?

I recently visited InfoComm Asia, a Hong Kong based trade show on audiovisual technologies. Though majority of the products showcased are about entertainment and sports, there are a few who are dedicated to the readers of this web site.

Jacques Bertrand, Barco’s President for Asia Pacific, told me over the sidelines that the complexity of many control and monitoring operations simply requires a rethinking about the system – how to make them more versatile and sustainable.

He summarised the situation as “you have so many places where you capture the images; you have so many places where you edit the images; and you have so many places where you review them.” It doesn’t take much effort to argue that for big operations, screen stacks lack two of the most essential qualities to survive the proliferation of cameras – scalability & flexibility.

Therefore sophisticated LCD or rear-projection based displays are gaining their ground in non military monitoring operations, although they don’t attract as much glamour as artificial intelligence does.

And for many operations, it simply makes more sense to integrate video surveillance and other monitoring data, such as geospatial information and sensor measurements, to give the security control room a holistic view of the real-time situation.

So security managers are able to prioritise the display easily based on operational needs, with the visual data comprehensively represented to them upon request. And with the latest technologies such as Microsoft Surface, control of visual data representation will become unprecedentedly easy and intuitive.

Obviously it is not only the display which needs to be scalable and flexible – sound network and data processing capabilities are needed to stream and transmit this huge amount of data from various sources.

The emerging IP surveillance, though far from prevalent (and even not very close to universally understood), is perceived to offer much flexibility to security professionals. As everything becomes part of the network, security managers are now able to view the data they monitor from any place at any time with a fast and secure connection.

And that’s not the most beautiful part of it – the flexibility of collaboration is. Critical security managers can still attend to emergencies while on holidays; metro operators will let the fire brigade view their visual data when a rescue operation is needed; the mayor of the city will be able to make decisions based on visual data shared by multiple agencies.

Or as Bertrand put it: “It’s basically consolidating all the visual data together at one place and share it back by allowing people at other locations to view.”

For small organisations, managed services might be a good way moving forward. Currently the monitoring personnel are largely from contractors anyway and pooling resources also helps with scalability and more, flexibility.