Estate management made simple
The challenge
When the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham started to renovate one of their properties, it found that objects were being thrown that disrupted the progress of the work and endangered the workmen. The council wanted to identify the culprits. Part of the answer was to record the footage of it on CCTV cameras. Then they just had to analyse the hours and hours of video recorded.
Key benefits
- Automatically analyse video footage in real-time
- No operator intervention required
- Analysis results quickly and easily reviewed
- Eliminate need for constant monitoring of CCTV cameras
- Events grouped and output to another tape for evidential purposes
The Borough has over 14,000 properties - worth approximately £2.8 billion – that need to be protected as well as improving community safety. By installing CCTV cameras, it could monitor activity on its property. However, that would mean an operator monitoring the screen 24 hours a day. The operator would be looking for seconds of activity in hours of nothing happening. The chances of events being missed increase after as little as 22 minutes when operator fatigue sets in.
One way to overcome this is to record to video, but someone still has to analyse the hours of video tape leading to exactly the same issues. With Scyron, the Borough found a way to automatically analyse the video tape. It could define the events to look for and the zones of interest within the image where they expected the events to occur.
The video tape was analysed in real-time on a standard PC without the need for any operator intervention or without someone constantly monitoring the cameras. Each event is re-recorded on to the hard disk of the PC. The operator simply scans the list of events found and chooses which to keep and which to discard. The system will even record frames for a specified time just before and just after the event if necessary.
The result
Suddenly, the problem of watching endless hours of recorded CCTV footage for perhaps just seconds of action was a thing of the past. Now, with only a few mouse clicks, the organisation can isolate events of interest efficiently and effectively - saving a great deal of time and money. More importantly, the challenge of identifying the people who delight in vandalism has, at a stroke, become much easier to solve.
