The challenge facing the traffic monitoring system around Adelaide in South Australia is typical of many analogue CCTV systems worldwide – the cost to expand the system is prohibitive. This is why they turned to IndigoVision’s IP Video technology to provide a migration path to a fully digital CCTV system.
South Australia’s Department of Transport had been looking to improve their traffic monitoring systems and recognised that IP Networked Video was the future for CCTV surveillance.
According to Bob Carter, Senior Technical Officer, “We had assessed many manufacturers and felt that IndigoVision was in another league of its own. Picture quality, feature set and the flexibility to control other equipment made the choice easy.”
The South Eastern Freeway Tunnel project, specified by Rexel Video, was a good example of how IP Video technology can be deployed as part of a migration strategy. The existing CCTV cameras in the tunnel were connected to IndigoVision’s 10-way transmitter/receiver racks. These converted the analogue video to MPEG-4, 25fps 4CIF hi-quality digital video for transmission over a newly installed fibre-based network.
It was important that these new additions were seamlessly integrated into the existing CCTV system and that the configuration of the Norwood Traffic Control Centre, situated 15km from the tunnel, initially remained unchanged. To achieve this further IndigoVision racks were installed in the Traffic Control Centre to convert the digital video from the network to analogue, this was then fed into the existing matrix for crosspoint monitor switching. The only difference the operators saw was the significant improvement in the quality of the video from the tunnel cameras. In fact live images from the tunnel can be now be seen featured on television as part of Channel 7’s Early Morning Sunrise traffic report.
This project illustrates the simple migration path an IP Video solution can provide. Existing analogue cameras and matrix/switching equipment can be used so that new digital video signals can be integrated into existing configurations. Eventually the analogue matrix could be replaced with a “Virtual Matrix”, using IndigoVision’s “Control Center” enterprise video and alarm management software. This provides a more flexible and scaleable solution for the future and introduces features such as advanced analytics that are difficult to implement on analogue systems.