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IndigoVision's IP Video made available for London's schools

CCTV surveillance using IndigoVision's IP Video technology is being made available to London's schools via the London Grid for Learning's (LGfL) existing IT network.  The LGfL was established in June 2000 to provide capital-wide broadband internet services to London's 33 Local Education Authorities (LEA).  The network, supplied by Synetrix, went live in 2002 and now covers over 90% of schools in London.

IndigoVision's IP Video technology will allow any participating school to be monitored 24 hours a day, via the central control room for the project which is located in the London Borough of Bromley.  The control room uses 'Control Center', IndigoVision's enterprise video and alarm management software, which enables the security staff to control and view live and recorded video from any of the cameras at any of the schools.  IndigoVision has supplied a complete end to end solution which provides for visual verification of alarms over IP and is fully compliant with BS8418.  The consultants for the project, Redbridge CCTV Ltd, have set up an additional central control room in London to monitor commercial sites and other schools outside of the LGfL.

A number of pilot schools have been successfully completed, which are monitored centrally at Bromley and locally within each school.  School staff use ‘Control Center' software during the day to monitor the buildings.  IndigoVision Networked Video Recorders (NVRs) provide the storage for recorded video and being a networked solution the location of any NVR is transparent to the system.  Whether the NVRs are installed locally at the school or centrally in the control room, recorded footage on any NVR at any school can be viewed and analysed centrally at Bromley, as well as by the individual school.

With so many cameras being monitored around the system IndigoVision's advanced analytics are used to ensure potential events are quickly brought to the attention of the operators.  These include such features as virtual ‘trip wires', which ignore passing cars outside a school.  However, when a person crosses the ‘wire' in to the school, an alarm is raised and that camera is monitored.  An audio warning can be broadcast over the network to an intruder via on-site speakers using the high-quality audio available on every channel alongside the video.  The analytics software runs at the camera, providing real time analysis of each scene.

IndigoVision's compression technology allows streaming of the digital video around the network at 12fps with minimal impact on the bandwidth.  Each camera is connected to the IP network via IndigoVision 8000 transmitter/receiver modules, installed locally at the school.  The 8000 units convert the analogue camera signal to MPEG-4 digital video for transmission over the network and recording on the NVRs.