Intelligent Surveillance Cameras Are Reliably Delivering 20 Times More Efficiency

You can now have your cake and eat it in the security world, as Viseum reports its intelligent surveillance cameras are reliably delivering 20 times more efficiency than standard CCTV monitoring cameras; 20 times less cameras means not only huge hardware savings, it also means that skilled operators can focus their efforts on the most rewarding type of activity and are less engaged in unproductive duties.

Nature versus nurture; right versus wrong - in the security industry, the debate has always been between active versus passive security, particularly when it comes to CCTV systems. It has taken intelligent CCTV technology specialists Viseum UK to re-invent the wheel and propose a third way - delivering intelligent CCTV with all the advantages of both passive and active security with the disadvantages of none. CCTV experts have always liked to see cameras as an 'active' security measure, but as any security specialist will point out, most are in fact passive. Banks of cameras are all very well, but traditionally someone has to be monitoring them and this is a problem, when it comes to the role of the operator charged with the task of looking at banks of monitors all day long.

An operator's job has been perceived in the past as unimportant and unskilled; but 9/11 and the London bombings changed that perception for good. They went from being incidental to vital overnight - but human nature being what it is, the fundamental flaws of the role - fatigue in particular, is difficult to overcome.

The boredom induced from staring at banks of cameras for hours on end has been recognised and now many operators are far better trained and few will be asked to view banks of monitors for hours at a time. Current practice is to provide other jobs to break up the monotony. There is also the false sense of security that cameras can give to both the operator, to those who have installed them and the people they are supposed to protect.

The alternative is to have regular (active) patrols - of police or security guards, but this can prove expensive in time, manpower and costs and (it can be argued) a waste of resources. You also have to keep this in place 24/7. Until recently, many would opt for some combination of the two - cameras, with units ready to respond to any incidents reported - but this still relies not just on the alertness of the operator, but on the camera itself actually facing the right way when a crime is in progress or contemplation.

This problem seemed to have no obvious solution, until the arrival of Viseum UK. The arrival of intelligent software means that the system itself has been trained to spot suspicious activity and can instantly report this and zoom in on the area of concern. This does away with operator fatigue at a stroke and makes them far more productive - transforming a passive system that may or may not detect crime into the active deterrent and tool it was originally envisaged it would be - and saving money in the process.

"At Viseum we set out to deliver a system that could operate and detect potential incidents of concern without any need for human involvement, so factor an operator into the equation and we can make them significantly more productive and useful almost overnight," said Stuart Thompson, Viseum UK's Managing Director, inventor of their patented camera technology. "When I demonstrated this to a somewhat sceptical CCTV operation room manager, they immediately procured our cameras and delivered astonishing results."

Police forces currently spend many millions of pounds each year reviewing footage from security camera systems. This can take many hours to retrieve and review and often cannot be used because the incident did not occur right in front of the camera. Feedback from those police forces who use Viseum is that just four independently operating Viseum cameras can outperform 20 standard CCTV cameras - each of which would need a dedicated operator to watch and control them in order to catch crime.

"The beauty of Viseum intelligent software is its flexibility," explained Stuart. "It can be adapted to use with most security cameras and can 'stand alone' detecting crime in the community or it can work as the operator's best friend, pointing out areas of concern without the need to combat the fatigue caused by having to stare constantly at rows of monitors."

Natural fatigue means it is always possible that human operators can miss unusual behaviours that may be the prelude to a crime. Viseum's intelligent software picks up on these behaviours -ready for review by authorised personnel. It is this that has set Viseum apart and seen the company grow in leaps and bounds.