The Challenge
Traditionally the CCTV infrastructure in Ipswich had been focused primarily on individual installations where, without integration, there was no potential to share images with other locations, so the adoption of the DV-IP Servers - offering a Video over IP network solution - represented a dramatic enhancement in capability for the council.
In the lead-up and implementation stages of the project there was close collaboration between the local systems integrators, Ipswich Council and Dedicated Micros. An integrated plan was developed to deliver a simple and stable CCTV solution with enhanced network facilities so all of the council's CCTV could be controlled through its network, with DM providing vital input to the integrators on system design.
The Solution
The DV-IP Servers were chosen to play a pivotal role as a result of their ability to make best use the council's existing IT network as the transport mechanism for CCTV images. Given that four of the main council buildings were spread across the city, distributed networking was a perfect security and management solution. Ease of use and enhanced functionality compared to more traditional systems were also key considerations. Another factor of major importance to the council in the adoption of the DV-IP Servers was the potential to upload data to an FTP Server automatically on a scheduled or event-driven command. In the case of an attached device being activated the video data associated with the device and camera would be instantly uploaded to a secure remote site for storage and later viewing.
Initially 12 DV-IP units were specified and installed at key locations in Ipswich including the WG Hayden Humanities Centre - a multi-functional building providing both meeting room and office accommodation to community based organisations, the Civic Hall, Arts Foundation and Museum.
The council now has the ability to observe images from internal and external CCTV cameras at the sites from any PC on its network, capture images from any location and, crucially, store vital evidence for later use. Designed as a hybrid security solution, the DV-IP Server has a major advantage over many of its competitors as it stores evidential-quality M-JPEG images locally to ensure every detail of every incident is captured clearly - even if the network goes down - and is simultaneously able to steam bandwidth friendly MPEG-4 video across the network on demand.
An Ipswich Council spokesperson said: "We are extremely pleased with the performance of the DV-IP Servers, already they have proved their worth at Ipswich by allowing us to see the bigger picture when it comes to the safety and security of our multiple sites. Several criminal cases have benefited from the evidence gathered by the system and images will soon be available to operators at the City Safe Control Room for centralised out-of-hours monitoring of all of our linked sites."
The DV-IP servers are not the only DM contribution to the Ipswich project, a number of its Dennard dome cameras have also been installed across the city.
The Future
Looking ahead there are ambitious plans to further expand the capabilities of the DV-IP solution at Ipswich, involving the integration of building alarm and access control systems at key council sites with the DV-IP Servers. This should be relatively straightforward to put into practice, given the use by DM of open protocols in its DV-IP Servers and the availability of a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows integrators to customise systems to different end-user requirements.The success at Ipswich has already led to significant interest from other local authorities and there are a number of Australian DV-IP projects in the pipeline for DM.
