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March 07, 2005

The role of digital video for security

A nice overview article on the role of digital video over at Federal Computer Week, a few good nuggets:

Market research firm Datamonitor sees digital video surveillance as a worldwide market worth $7.4 billion by 2007, a 55 percent yearly growth from $1.3 billion in 2003. The firm's analysts expect the public sector to account for as much as 22 percent of that future market.

Leading the charge are companies like iMove, which manufactures what it calls wide-area surveillance solutions. Typical surveillance cameras can only pan, tilt and zoom over a relatively narrow field, and many such cameras are needed to cover a broad area. By comparison, far fewer of iMove's FlexG spherical sensors, each of which uses an array of imaging systems, are needed to continuously cover the same area. For example, to keep an eye on an area three-quarters of a mile long by half a mile wide, company officials say an iMove solution using just nine of the company's FlexG sensors will do the job. It would take 242 closed-circuit TV cameras to do the same.

Video surveillance cameras produced by IPIX, which similarly provide complete, continuous coverage of an area, were used at President Bush's inauguration in Washington, D.C., in January. They were also used to guard the G8 Summit held last June in Sea Island, Ga.

A test of a digital video system at the Jacksonville, Fla., International Airport — funded as part of a $28 million Transportation Security Administration program to develop airport security systems —uses this kind of an analog/ digital mix. The system takes the video feeds from some 100 analog cameras positioned at security checkpoints and all along the length of the airport concourse, digitizes the video and then "stitches" the resulting digital images together to essentially provide a single, real-time view of the area. "It essentially produces a movie on the fly," said Gianni Arcaini, chief executive officer of Duos Technologies, the project's prime contractor and integrator. "The idea is that, if a security breach is committed, we can wind back to when the breach happened and security agents can then follow the person who committed the breach everywhere they went."

Posted by rshah at March 7, 2005 07:59 PM

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