The Problem
Security's a constant concern for anyone with business premises. If you deal in something with a financial value there's always someone out there eager to steal it. Physical security is one way to tackle this, but human rights laws mean that you're as likely as not to end up being prosecuted if your guard dog bites the thief, the electric fence shocks him or the barbed wire snags his new trainers.
Your next line of defence is to prosecute the thief after he's stolen your goods, and that's where CCTV comes in. But CCTV has its problems. It's enormously expensive to install, it requires careful operation and it's far from 100 per cent reliable.
We're now starting to see cases where the quality of the pictures taken by traditional CCTV systems is so low you can't identify the criminals; a blurred image comes into the camera's field of vision, floats across the screen and drifts off again.
If you have to remember to change a tape every day, your security system's impractical. Someone will forget to change it, someone will overwrite yesterday's tape with today's footage and someone will assume a tape that's been overwritten a hundred times still records high-quality video.
We've compared IP telephony to ordinary telephony in early case studies; this month we're comparing ordinary CCTV with the latest IP-based surveillance. IP-based digital CCTV addresses all the limitations of traditional CCTV. It's cheaper to install, records higher-quality video and is easier to operate. But is it really as wonderful as its advocates make out?
Case Study
Hindmarch & Co is a family-run car dealership and petrol station based in Stamford, Lincolnshire. It became a Peugeot dealership in 1972. The business has a five-acre lot that encompasses new and used car sales, a workshop, bodyshop and forecourt. It spans two sites that are quite close together and, from an IT standpoint, are linked by a VPN. It employs around 45 people and sells about 1,000 cars a year.
The company's problems stem from two of the products it sells - petrol and cigarettes. Criminals would do the world a service if they mixed the two and blew themselves to kingdom come, but you can't trust them to do anything right. That leaves the Hindmarch family trying to find ways to deter theft in the first instance and prosecute it in the second.
The Solution
Hindmarch is not new to the idea of CCTV. It had its first CCTV system installed 10 years ago but the passage of time has made it ineffective. Just as an increase in crime was making surveillance more important, the quality of the system deteriorated to such an extent that its output was useless. The police wouldn't accept it as evidence.
Upgrading a system is an unattractive prospect for any organisation because upgrades are so expensive. The thing that convinced Hindmarch was the ever-increasing number of 'runners' from the forecourt - people who fill up with petrol and drive away without paying for it.
The company turned to Ben Howe at Control-Z Computers (www.control-z-computers.com), its existing IT supplier, because Ben had changed the focus of his business from PCs and networking to digital security systems. This is, to us, the most interesting thing about modern CCTV systems: because they're driven through IP, security cameras become a computer peripheral. They're just another device on the end of an Ethernet cable.
When Hindmarch spoke to Howe it found that one of the greatest advantages of digital CCTV systems is that there is no need to install the expensive coaxial cabling that analogue systems use. Thanks to wireless Ethernet you can even get away with no cables at all in some situations, although Hindmarch hasn't followed this route.
Advanced cabling can help in other ways too. It's possible that a camera will need to be installed where there's no mains power. This is no problem for surveillance because some cameras use PoE (Power over Ethernet) to take their power from the network cable. These tend to be expensive cameras with a collection of advanced capabilities you may not need, such as low-light sensitivity and an automatic iris lens. A cheaper alternative is to use a PoE adaptor to power an entry-level camera.
CANDID CAMERAS
There are many different variations of camera, with features to match specific needs. Picking the right one depends greatly on your environment. You can have hardened outdoor cameras that adapt to varying light levels. You also have the option of indoor cameras that are cheaper but require a constant light level. Infrared cameras can see in the dark, and you might want a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera to track a person. Other options include wireless cameras, motion-detecting cameras and network-powered cameras. The choice is huge.
Control-Z became a main dealer for Axis Communications (www.axis.com/uk) because it has a wide enough range of cameras to suit almost every requirement. At Hindmarch, Howe installed different models for different locations.
The cameras in the station forecourt and shop are running constantly during business hours. Their feed is relayed to a single PC that runs Milestone Systems' XProtect surveillance software (www.milestonesys.com).
Because Hindmarch's system relies on Axis cameras, you might think it strange that it doesn't also employ Axis software. The problem was that, at the time Hindmarch ordered its system, the Axis software lagged behind the competition. In particular, the software didn't support archiving: the ability to store a day's footage automatically for future reference. Archiving is now a feature of Axis' Camera Station Software and, had Hindmarch ordered its system today, Howe would install that software.
One of the incredible things about digital CCTV systems is that they don't require outlandish hardware. Although Howe recommends using a dedicated PC for the surveillance system, it doesn't have to be an expensive one. The only thing you need is plenty of disk space. The more you have, the more footage you can record, and at a higher quality.
OPERATION SURVEILLANCE
Out of business hours the surveillance system switches to standby. It records footage only when motion is detected on the forecourt or in the shop. There are two schools of thought on what you should use to detect motion. One method is a PIR (Passive InfraRed)-equipped camera. When PIR detects motion the camera starts capturing video and the software starts recording it. Although all Axis' cameras have PIR as an option, it's a significant expense.
The alternative is to leave the motion detection to the software. This is a standard feature, but the disadvantage of this technique is that the cameras have to stay on all the time, feeding the software a steady stream of unchanging scenery. This clogs your network with worthless video. On the other hand, do you really care about clogging up the network in the middle of the night?
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
Unless you have spotlights to light an area, the camera you choose for night-time surveillance must be suitable for very low-light conditions. The Axis 205, an entry-level camera, is an indoor camera that starts working only at a level of 10 Lux, or twilight conditions.
To keep an eye on what people are doing at night, Hindmarch has installed Axis 2420IR cameras. This moves the installation into a different cost category. Whereas an entry-level 205 costs £125, 2420IRs are £942 each. To say these cameras see in the dark is a little misleading. In fact, they see in infrared light, which means you also have to install IR illuminators that are essentially floodlights for infrared-sensitive devices such as the 2420IR. These cost £300 each, which makes night-time surveillance expensive.
One of the interesting things Hindmarch discovered about infrared cameras is that their focus has to be set up at night. If you set the focus in daylight it becomes blurred when it switches to infrared. This is due to the different wavelengths of infrared and visible light, which affects the strength of the camera's lens. This situation makes summer installations particularly unpopular with Howe, as he has to do a lot of midnight tweaking.
WARNING
One of the unexpected implications of the Data Protection Act is that you have to warn people if you film them in a public place, although the same doesn't apply if you're monitoring your own house. This is one of the reasons you see CCTV notices on garage forecourts.
Another reason for such warnings could be to act as a deterrent. However, it did not work for Hindmarch: people continued to break into the shop and steal petrol after the new digital surveillance system was installed. The difference is that now the evidence is good enough to use for prosecution.
At first glance, the digital footage of a crime doesn't look that much different to analogue footage, as it's still a little furry and indistinct. But that's just because the standard screen image is zoomed out. With a digital recording you can zoom in a great deal. The picture is so clear there can be no mistaking a car's number plate.
HOME MOVIES
If evidence for a prosecution is needed, Hindmarch's system is equipped with an inkjet printer and CD/DVD writer. The printer is used for producing still images, and the CD/DVD writer is used to create video sequences.
Milestone's XProtect software makes it quite easy to cut a particular sequence and export it to an .avi file. Unlike tape-based analogue systems, there's no need to wind backwards and forwards until you find a robbery. If it happened in the day you can skip straight to a particular time. If the shop was closed you wouldn't know what time it happened, but the software adds a flag every time the motion detection system sensed something happening, so it's easy to locate the correct footage.
Despite the simplicity of the system, Howe creates the video CDs and still pictures for Hindmarch. It may look easy to us - especially as CD authoring is a part of Windows XP - but it's something the staff don't want to have to learn.
This means that if the case ever came to court Howe would have to testify to the video's integrity, but to date this is only a theoretical inconvenience. Criminals have always confessed when presented in their starring roles. During a spate of nine thefts in as many weeks, five were resolved in this way.
SECURITY HOLES
Sharp though it may be, digital video surveillance doesn't solve all Hindmarch's problems. Some criminals disguise themselves with hoods or masks and it's difficult to see a way around this - even if they missed the warning notices they couldn't help but see the cameras. And Axis doesn't sell covert cameras.
The best compromise has been to try to catch thieves when they relax. Putting an infrared camera in what criminals think is a dark, safe zone means you might catch them when they take their masks off.
Because all the Axis cameras used by Hindmarch are IP-based, feeding their footage to the web is relatively simple. The proprietors can see what's happening on the forecourt whether they're in the office, at home or even on holiday. This isn't a feature they use, but we can take advantage of it all the same: go to www.axis.com /uk/demo_sites.htm and select the Retail Sites, Petrol Station Forecourt. You'll see a live feed from the very forecourt we visited.
According to Howe there'sa thriving business in remotely monitoring holiday homes. You can count the lizards on your lawn in Barbados from the PC in your living room in Bolton. All you need is a broadband connection in Barbados. If you use motion detection the camera can text or email you when it senses someone in your house.
The ultimate level of sophistication (and entertainment) is to add audio capabilities to the surveillance. Imagine how scared a burglar would be, creeping around a house in the dead of night, only to hear an eerie voice saying "I'm watching you!" This isn't an idle daydream. For £190, you can buy equipment to enable you to do this. Now, isn't that tempting?
Author: Steve Baxter
Securing your premises