As a multi-faceted community with several buildings, public safety services, healthcare facilities, schools, childcare, barracks, a commissary and a visitor’s centre, a typical U.S. Military base is a city in itself. Beyond the protection of armed forces personnel, the base is responsible for the safety of many civilians and civil servants.
With such high standards and complex needs, U.S Military bases recognise the need for intelligent security systems that enable proactive monitoring, provide fast and smart forensics and comply with NDAA Section 889.
Challenges faced by the US Military Base
- Inadequate situational awareness - The size and diversity of the military base pose a challenge. Past security measures led to gaps in coverage, leaving the base vulnerable to both internal and external threats. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic created the need for increased situational awareness. Without a real-time and dynamic understanding of the environment, it became increasingly difficult to enforce preventative measures to control and mitigate the risk of transmission.
- Slow incident response time - Speed is critical. Within the confines of the military base, the consequences of slow incident response time can be devastating and even sometimes deadly. The longer it takes for the Security Operation Centre (SOC) to gather, understand, and analyse the details of the incident, the greater the threat becomes. It became clear that responding to an Active Shooter, vehicle breach, or an assault, required immediate action that wasn’t available through their existing technology.
- Limited real-time analytic capabilities - The base wanted to prevent incidents from occurring rather than reacting after an incident has occurred. The traditional method of receiving an emergency call and responding after the fact was too costly. The US Base needed a platform that would provide the security team with automation notifications and alerts based on anomalies and rule-violations that were captured on video.
- NDAA-889 compliance - All military bases must meet the NDAA-889 compliance which states that the U.S. Government has banned specific telecommunications and video surveillance equipment utilising chips manufactured in China. Government contractors must help agencies remove/ replace banned equipment by Aug 12, 2021.
Why Ava?
One U.S. Military Base recently turned to Ava for an end-to-end intelligent security solution that would meet its full range of needs. Their requirements were a platform that was:
- Proactive - When there is a need to respond to a threat, the response needed to be immediate.
- Precise - On a base of this size, it was critical to pinpoint the exact location and nature of a security event in seconds - not hours or days.
- Simple - The system needed be straightforward to implement, manage and use within the existing infrastructure and cameras. Ease of use saves time and lives.
- Scalable - The system needed to be able to scale to thousands of cameras.
Protecting military personnel and staff at the base
Using Ava, operators can add maps of all the US Military Bases’ locations to gain situational awareness and insights
Ava understood that the ability to protect military personnel and civilians that run the US Military Base is of utmost importance with even seconds being critical. Ava’s wicked-fast and smart forensic searches and powerful analytics transform the manually intensive examination of massive surveillance footage into accurate and useful results within mere minutes. Security operators are using powerful appearance, event, or image search functions to narrow down and track people or objects of interest.
Using Ava, security operators can add maps of all the US Military Bases’ locations to gain situational awareness and insights. Each map can be configured and includes camera views, alarm views, as well as the ability to track people and objects as they move around the campus.
Only Ava could meet their challenges by providing:
- Advanced Situational Awareness: Powered by Ava’s Smart Presence, the company’s use of AI and machine learning allows security personnel and operators to detect anything unusual at any time. Ava Aware VMS understands perimeters and behaviours, identifies, classifies, and tracks people of interest, vehicles, or other objects to send alerts before threats escalate. Operators now receive immediate alerts on unidentified loud noises including the exact source of the sound through microphones. The US Military Base’s security teams are now able to stop threatening actions, before there is damage to property or people.
- Rapid Incident Response: Powered by Ava’s Spotlight, video streams change dynamically to bring only the relevant feeds to the attention of the operator. Real-time alerts and notifications show up on the video wall to describe the incident, the time, and place it occurred. Using Ava’s Smart Search, the base is able to search by event and similarity to perform appearance and image detection powered by machine learning capabilities to comb through countless hours of video within seconds.
- Real-time Analytics: Ava provided the US Military Base with threat detection and notifications in real-time and uses intelligent algorithms and self-learning to detect abnormal behaviour. The platform will alert the base’s security operators in real-time. It will intelligently highlight what’s relevant from all of the US Base’s cameras, in real-time, all the time.
- NDAA Compliant - Ava’s video hardware is TAA (Trade Agreement Act) Compliant, enabling any base to be fully NDAA 889 compliant.
Ava’s solution provided operational efficiencies, such as:
- Seamless integration with existing cameras - Whether a military base is replacing all or some of their cameras, Ava Aware VMS easily integrates into and enhances existing cameras with the same AI capabilities. Now, existing ONVIF cameras are enhanced with analytics such as object detection, people and vehicle count, similarity based searching and more. By linking all existing cameras into a larger, AI-based video analytic platform, the base can leverage these powerful analytics across ‘all the cameras, all the time’.
- Access Control Integration - Ava’s solution easily integrates into access control, remote monitoring, and existing infrastructure. Monitoring the entire military base can be done as part of a single video management system.
- Scalable - The platform can easily be clustered to meet the growing needs of a base, from hundreds to thousands of cameras.
- Deployment simplicity - Ava’s system is designed for overall simplicity and readiness for deployment. With security cameras that were ready to go, fully loaded with out-of-the-box Ava Aware software, the base could easily replace cameras in a phased implementation, minimising installation time and eliminating downtime. Ava’s simplified licencing/pricing model further simplified deployment.
Plug and play configuration
Plug and play configuration removes the need for user names and passwords
The same simplicity extends to maintaining scalable management within a base’s group configuration policies. Plug and play configuration removes the need for user names and passwords, pre-configuration steps, and default settings.
And finally, the base chose the Ava system for its general ease of use. Security operators now have access to detailed camera information, activity logs, and advanced video adjustments in a single, user-friendly screen view.
Set up for success with intelligent video security
The US Military Base is now set up for success with an end-to-end intelligent video security system that will scale with their needs. Highlights include:
- Camera installation, which will put the base into full compliance with NDAA-889.
- The US Military Base now has the highest level of security, to protect against the vulnerabilities of the connected world. The equipment has end-to-end encryption, factory-installed certificates, and records detailed audit trails of both operators and administrators to assist with any other compliance requirements.
- Security operators have gone from having ‘data overload’ to easily and quickly accessing ‘actionable insights’ to drive more confident and proactive security decisions. By leveraging powerful analytics, the base’s operators are able to respond in real-time and investigate incidents faster and with fewer resources. Operators are able to act on the system’s identification of objects, events, anomalies, and similarities that detect issues as they unfold.
- Furthermore, operators also have full occupancy insight to manage the flow of people and traffic across the base, in support of COVID-19 rules and regulations.
- Ava Smart Presence includes a people and vehicle counter to track objects in real-time, allowing for historical analysis and reporting. Configurable maps of all locations provide instant situational awareness and insights.
- The US Military Base seamlessly integrated the new system with existing access controls and non-banned cameras to cost-effectively meet the mandate and fully leverage analytics across the entire security system.
- Security teams at the base can trust in a powerful security solution that doesn’t inadvertently contain technology that poses a new threat.
Whether enhancing existing cameras with advanced video analytics, replacing the entire video security system to meet the NDAA mandate, or creating a solution from scratch, the U.S. Military and supporting agencies can benefit from Ava’s secure cameras and leverage Ava’s powerful analytics for the highest levels of proactive security.
