Customer
Suez Cement, the largest cement producer in Egypt, operates an industrial network of five cement production facilities in Suez, Kattameya, Tourah, Helwan and El Minya. The company has a long-standing history in the Egyptian market and is innovative in launching new brands and products to meet market needs. The company’s five plant facilities use state-of-the-art technology to deliver quality cement to Egyptian and export markets.
Challenge
Needing a day/night video surveillance system for its plants, Suez Cement wanted to minimise the number of cameras required for full coverage without compromising video quality. Using fewer cameras and minimising infrastructure would meet their objective of lowering system costs.
Megapixel solution
Desiring to install a new video surveillance system, Suez Cement turned to G4S Egypt. The integrator leveraged the benefits of Arecont Vision megapixel cameras to convince the customer to go with an IP system with higher megapixel resolution rather than using analogue or standard resolution cameras.
“G4S Egypt chose Arecont Vision megapixel cameras to cover important areas in the factories to meet the specific needs of the cement production environment,” said Ahmed Said, G4S Systems Director. Megapixel camera views provide license plate recognition in some areas and packing details and security standards in other areas.
Three different locations use a combination of Arecont Vision 1.3- and 3.0-megapixel cameras, connected locally to a network video recorder (NVR) and across leased lines to a centralised location. The Arecont Vision MegaDome® AV1355DN 1.3 Megapixel H.264 Day/Night Dome Camera, an all-in-one integrated camera, lens and IP66-rated dome housing provides 1280x1024-pixel images at 32 frames per second (fps). For higher resolution, Suez Cement uses Arecont Vision’s 3.0-megapixel Day/Night cameras providing 2048x1536-pixel images at 15fps. Each camera uses Arecont Vision’s MegaVideo® image processing at billions of operations per second. Both cameras are day/night versions with a motorised infrared (IR) cut filter, which automatically switches the camera from colour to black-and-white mode at night to allow 24-hour surveillance. Other capabilities include motion detection, image cropping, region-of-interest viewing and forensic zooming. The cameras use H.264 (MPEG-4, Part 10) compression to minimise bandwidth and storage requirements while maintaining real-time image frame rate. Compact camera sizes enable easy installation in outdoor housings. Power-over- Ethernet (PoE) supplies camera power on the same Ethernet cable used for data transmission.
Megapixel benefit
“Based on Arecont Vision’s diverse megapixel offering, picture quality and reliability, the project turned out to be a big success for all parties involved,” comments Mr. Said.
The cameras’ H.264 codec maintains excellent image quality while keeping video file sizes to a minimum. Imaging can be magnified digitally while preserving critical image details, and moving the enlarged image area up and down and from side to side provides a virtual pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) function. A single megapixel camera can be used in place of several analog cameras, resulting in significant time and cost savings as well as a reduction in infrastructure. Multi-streaming provides up to eight concurrent, non-identical video streams, each with a different frame rate, bit rate, resolution and image area. Region-of-interest (ROI) viewing enables an area of the screen to be viewed in higher resolution than the surrounding image, providing superior detailed images while reducing network load.
At Suez Cement, the features of the megapixel cameras translate into much greater system functionality at lower cost with a faster return on investment (ROI).
