Agencies Sharing Video for Situational Awareness
During a large scale incident, wouldn’t it be nice if campus law enforcement, the local police, fire department, public works and department of transportation could all view each others’ video for a more coordinated response and improved situational awareness? According to Mike Fabbri, director of business development for Motorola Data Solutions Operations, this is exactly what is being considered by many law enforcement agencies.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest by our customers in the public safety or emergency or city governments to be able to take advantage of all of the video resources that are being placed in our cities,” he says. “In the event of an incident, the emergency operations center is looking to have access to any and all of those video assets to help them better manage that incident.”
When this occurs, the video can be streamed to officers’ PDAs, laptops and other mobile devices. But streaming video requires some smart bandwidth management strategies. According to Fabbri, the video being stored centrally must be high resolution, while officers in the field require lower resolution images for situational awareness. Generally, the dispatch center or operations manager determines what should be streamed to officers. The necessary video is then pushed out via an indoor wireless local area network (LAN), wide-area broadband network or any number of different wireless technologies.
“I might be storing evidentiary quality or much higher quality video that I might want to review later so I can look for a particular license plate number or face,” says Fabbri. “But when I’m streaming that video, I can optimize it over the number of frames per second. Some tremendous progress has been made from a compression perspective. I can factor that in to get the optimal usage over whatever wireless bandwidth I have available.”
He says even images from megapixel cameras can be used when the bandwith is dialed back and compression is modified.
Others video experts, however, are still somewhat wary about streaming video to mobile devices. “A lot of people ask about that technology,” says Morello. “Those are nice-to-haves but not need-to-haves. Keep in mind the higher the bit rate, image quality and frame rate, the more difficult it is to stream to remote devices and have an acceptable image quality.” Latency issues can also be a challenge.
Keep a Close Eye on IP Video Developments
Although every institution is different, and the decision to upgrade must be made on a campus by campus basis, barriers to the cost-effective adoption of IP video surveillance systems are quickly being removed. Keeping current on this technology and its ever-evolving strengths and weaknesses will help you and your campus constituents make the right decision.
Related Articles:
- Getting Video to Play Nicely on the Network
- All American Upgrade
- Network Video Has the Right Answers
- Navigating the Web of IP Video Offerings
- 8 Factors to Consider When Deploying Video Analytics
Robin Hattersley Gray is executive editor of Campus Safety. She can be reached at [email protected].
Keywords: Video: CCTV, network video, IP video, surveillance
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