The continued expansion of IP camera networks increases the availability of useful information. At the same time, the opportunity exists to increase inter-agency collaboration. This makes information management all the more necessary in the control room environment. But the transportation sector could do a lot to help itself by gaining a better idea up front of what and how it wants to do things, says Electrosonic's Karl Johnson.
Internet Protocol (IP)-based cameras and networks for surveillance applications really started to make their presence felt in the US around eight to nine years ago. More recently, the UK, which has a large installed base of analogue-based systems, and Europe have made the transition. Although that changeover still has some way to go, the general, worldwide trend towards the use of very much greater numbers of cameras for surveillance and monitoring is now well established.The opportunities which IP-based networks open up for increased inter-agency cooperation mean that within the typical control room environment it is now possible to have a situation where feeds from literally hundreds of cameras are supplying information on key scenes and locations, together with associated data.
It forces control room system manufacturers and suppliers to support scalability and strive to be as brand-agnostic as possible; with the IP camera market still maturing there are literally dozens of manufacturers, each offering its own, bespoke idea of what works best.
Camera market consolidation
Karl Johnson, General Manager of Products at Electrosonic, believes that there is an opportunity for control room specifiers to take a more proactive role and have a more positive effect on the current situation, however."The control room market realises that IP cameras are appropriate technology but you only have to go along to one of the big security shows such as IFSEC to get a feel for how immature the IP camera sector still is and how much growth can continue," he says. "There is a very large number of vendors in the market at the moment and the uninitiated likely wouldn't know where to start when it comes to ascertaining what's the most appropriate solution for any given need. For IP surveillance there are standards for compression but there aren't for packaging, processing and sending data. The manufacturers might apply standards-based product designs such as MPEG-4 or MPEG-2 but their products aren't interoperable.
"Specialists will always provide good advice but customers need to be aware of just how relevant the standards are." When market applications mature, we typically see consolidation. When that happens we can expect
to see the number of camera suppliers reduce. This will be driven by a number of factors: company mergers and buy-outs, and customers coalescing around favoured solutions.
The current economic downturn might have some effect on the process, but public and private security is still in a growth phase globally.
In terms of the global slump, Johnson notes that no-one really has a firm idea of when it might end.
"But on the whole vendor choice tends to tie-in the end-user for a good few years," he adds.
Learning from elsewhere
Control room system manufacturers and suppliers commonly supply to a number of different vertical markets. There are, however, often marked differences between them and so in reality there is often little opportunity for the transportation sector to learn from others' experiences."For instance, the multiplicity of standards has bedeviled the broadcasting industry for years. That industry has managed to force standardisation to happen to a degree but the dynamics in different markets aren't always the same," says Johnson. "In some applications, closed-form solutions are the most sought-after because ultimate performance is the prime concern.
"If one goes on and compares the military control room environment with that of the public sector, projects for the former tend to have one decision-maker. Contract formulation for military requirements also tends to focus on longer-term solutions. Public sector projects typically involve far greater numbers of stakeholders having access to contractors. That increases variety and dilutes control, and price also tends to be a bigger driver of technology choice."
"Bigger projects in the transportation sector have a greater tendency to choose a long-term vendor - you'd hope to see more attention to detail in something more large-scale, so perhaps that's only to be expected - but quite a number of transportation management professionals might only be involved in the procurement for only one control room over the course of their whole career." That fragmentation makes it difficult to see how the transportation sector can at present drive a standards effort for video over IP, he feels. Although it is common for large numbers of agencies to be involved in large-scale public-sector command and control projects, Johnson feels that it is still possible for them to focus in on some key areas such as IP cameras. But it will take time.
"There is some evidence that camera manufacturers themselves are attempting to come together to establish more interoperability. This will at least allow some of them to differentiate themselves as a small group but I really do think that the drive for anything like that to happen requires more push from the customer base.."
Data management
As the scale and complexity of visual data in command and control centres continues to grow, managing the data deluge is increasingly important. The systems must be capable of supporting far more scalability than in the past, particularly more input information sources."It means that systems and processes are most likely to fall over at the times of greatest stress - the times when you most need them to work best. 9/11 was a prime example of that," Johnson continues.
An issue here is the propensity to over-specify: "So many organisations focus on collaborating with raw data, which would require trying to implement a system from the ground up. They should perhaps look at what they want to do and apply simple collaboration solutions before diving into deep data integration projects. There are relatively simple solutions for sharing collaborative information visually. The information originating from huge amounts of data can often be defined down to one composite image presented on a screen for sharing. This visual data can be shared, while avoiding the need for all agencies to independently have access to and process the data behind that image. Control rooms are always going to be unique locations to some extent because of the need to accommodate legacy systems and even the space and the geometries which they occupy. Real-time image-sharing is the way forward as it will at least allow numerous, existing stove-piped command and control room solutions to share information without requiring the raw data to be shared."
Marriage of convenience
A simple example of visual collaboration can be illustrated by a project implemented at Trafik Stockholm, a joint venture between the City of Stockholm and the Swedish Road Administration, Vägverket, provides an example of visual collaboration. The two organisations wanted to operate using two control rooms located over 2km from each other.
The primary control room at Trafik Stockholm is a termination point for over 800 MPEG-4 cameras. A large number of MPEG-4 decoders supply video inputs from the IP camera network to a 2x8 projection video wall. Data and graphic screens representing conditions in the traffic system are prepared on computers by operators in the control room. The complex combination of video, data and graphics presented on the video wall is unique to viewers in the control room.
In order to share the visual data with the second control room, two outputs presented on the video wall are prepared with a combination of video, data and graphic information specifically for sharing or collaborating outside the control room. These image combinations are presented on high-resolution displays (1,400x1,050). They are encoded and streamed across the Trafik Stockholm network using a VN-MATRIX data/graphic encoder manufactured by Electrosonic to Vägverket at Solna, some 2km away. The staff at Vägverket are able to view the visual data in real time with low delay and high image quality using minimal network bandwidth. The two organisations are able to view the same information simultaneously with the same image qualities, allowing them to collaborate without spending significant time and effort tying data systems together and duplicating equipment.
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