When you include the suburbs, the city of Lyon, France, with 445,452 inhabitants and a surface area of 47.87 square metres is the second largest city of France. Lyon was in need of a video surveillance system to monitor the access and exit of pedestrians and cars in the city centre. Transmission of video, intercom and data over an IP network for opening fences were just some of the requirements.
Siqura B.V. offered the complete IP-surveillance solution optimised to fit the purpose of the customer. In this case, they developed a system consisting of a total of 90 cameras and access barriers that were connected in a network to be monitored and operated from one single PC.
All the while, Siqura had to keep in mind that they had to abide by the rules the city of Lyon has set in their video surveillance ethics chart. This states that their inhabitants should feel secure, but at the same time their privacy should not be invaded unnecessarily.
As part of the SIQURA video solution, an IP Ethernet network was designed. The video encoder provides the highest DVD-quality video over IP Ethernet networks. It supports multi-stream video at different frame rates for simultaneous monitoring, recording, intelligent scene analysis, etc. Both software and hardware decoding were done by using the C-series codecs, Fast Ethernet switches.
These environmentally hardened C-series codecs were installed in outdoor cabinets. They are ideal for gate or door applications: one or more cameras to view the visitor, 2-way CD-quality audio to speak with the visitor and serial data and contacts for door and barrier control.
The C-series codecs can be daisy chained to connect more nodes on a single fibre optic cable. For applications, which demand a high availability, the C-series codecs can be connected to the central equipment using a redundant ring connection. Up to 30 nodes can be connected in a ring. The Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) will provide sub-second recovery of the connection in case of a fibre break. When creating a larger system with more nodes and more bandwidth, several rings can be interconnected. If the application requires even more bandwidth, a Gigabit backbone is required of the requirements.
