The Campus Connection
IP-based security centralizes campus surveillance
- By Carla Saavedra
- Aug 01, 2009
Brigham Young University has long been an early adopter of new
technology. In fact, it established the Technology Transfer Office
to facilitate the transfer of university-developed technologies into
the general marketplace by protecting any intellectual property
with patents, copyrights and other licensing. So it is no surprise
that the university started running its security system on an IP
network in 1998, when many universities were still using VCRs
as their primary recorder.
Since 2004, BYU has been taking steps to transition its security
cameras from analog to digital -- a daunting task with 700
analog cameras scattered about campus.
“We have an extensive IP network throughout the whole campus
that is very mature, and instead of trying to bring all of those
analog cameras in over its own coax cabling, it just made sense
to just use our existing [IP] infrastructure,” said Steve Goodman,
technology and communications supervisor for BYU Police.
College campuses have benefited immensely from IP-based
security, mainly because many of the unique problems faced by
universities -- including multiple buildings, constant activity and
a large concentration of people within a small radius -- are resolved
by implementing IP-based infrastructures.
Centralizing A Decentralized Environment
IP video takes advantage of an existing network infrastructure
and the availability of the Internet to transmit video without any
distance limitations.
“You would typically use it when you need to get over a physical
distance, like crossing a street in New York City or going
around the world,” said Gary Perlin, vice president of video products
for Speco Technologies, explaining that IP-based security is
ideal for multi-campus facilities because it makes transmitting
video over long distances easier.
“With a campus environment, typically the systems that are
recording video from cameras are decentralized,” said Brian
Carle, product manager for Salient Systems. A building could
have one or several servers servicing a certain number of cameras,
and going from building to building to perform system
maintenance and administration would be a nightmare. With an
IP-based system, all of the servers feed back into the same network,
allowing security personnel to manage all video feeds from
a centralized location.
Security administrators can implement features such as
distributed access and shared event management, in which
operators can share event-handling from multiple locations.
“This is a critical consideration in large-scale or multisite systems,”
said Gadi Piran, president and CTO of OnSSI. IP-video features,
such as blank-screen monitoring and video transmission to
handheld devices, result in higher system-wide efficiency, he said.
With a centralized dispatch communications center in place,
Goodman can monitor the entire campus and use the IP network
for gate control.
“When a car pulls up to a gate, a license plate recognition
camera reads the plate and it queries over the IP network to a centralized
database to see if that car is authorized to enter,” Goodman
said. The verified plate information then goes back through
the network to the gate controller and opens the gate.
Using Existing Infrastructure
As early adopters of VoIP in 2000, BYU already had the foundation
to switch its security system over to IP.
“When you base your whole phone communication over an IP
network, it makes sure that you have a pretty good network,”
Goodman said. “It also means that it’s pervasive as far as points
across campus, so we could easily put our electronic security systems
wherever the phones were.”
The scalability of an IP infrastructure is much more flexible
than analog because one can scale in single-camera increments.
Perlin also explained that an IP infrastructure’s wireless capabilities
allows for faster deployment of temporary cameras. “For
a special event, I could put all those cameras on an 802.11n wireless
system and tap into my security network and not even run a
cable,” he said.
With an analog system, recorders, switches and matrices typically
come in specific numbers. For instance, if someone has a
32-camera DVR and wants to add another camera into the system,
he or she can’t buy a single channel in the DVR system because
the devices don’t come in single-channel increments.
“With an IP video system, you can add a single camera at a
time,” Carle said.
In an IP-based system, intelligence is at the edge of the camera,
enabling the cameras to monitor views by themselves.
“For example, if a camera is spray-painted or tampered with in
some way, newer IP cameras have the ability to detect that automatically
and send alerts to the operators, as opposed to finding
out that the camera is down after the incident occurs,” Carle said.
Long-Term Savings
Although IP video cameras have a higher upfront cost,
integrating them into a university’s existing infrastructure
lowers installation costs dramatically. For larger installations,
the cost of cabling can add up fairly quickly if installing an
analog network.
“Trenching and installing a coaxial cable across a university
campus or military base would dramatically increase the cost of a
system installation,” said J.M. Allain, president of Panasonic System
Solutions Co. “Whereas an IP backbone that is already in place
in the form of a communications network eliminates the problem.”
And when a cable or wire breaks, the cost of repairing or replacing
that component can add tremendous strain to maintaining
an analog security system.
“[IP] is a self-healing network because the computer infrastructure
is running over most of the IT world, and their models
have set up redundancies when they go from building to building,”
said Charlie Howell, owner and principal consultant of Security
Concepts and Planning.
A Bump in the Road
Like many new technologies, IP-based security has been slow to
gain traction within the security community.
“With an analog camera, everyone knows how to plug the
cable in,” Perlin said. “When it comes to a networked system --
whether it’s a DVR or networked cameras -- you have to know
how to configure the cameras and the routers.”
Moreover, bandwidth has been a major concern for businesses
considering switching to IP.
“Refresh rate is the biggest complaint because people are used
to a camera showing them live video and all of a sudden they’re getting
three pictures per second, and they don’t like that,” Perlin said.
Security professionals, however, have begun to take steps toward
resolving the issue. H.264 compression technology has had
a dramatic effect on reducing bandwidth consumption, surpassing
Motion-JPEG and even MPEG-4 technology.
Goodman decided to tackle the bandwidth problem before
switching to IP by implementing a distributive storage model.
“[The distributive model] works really well in a university environment
because we have about 330 buildings on campus, and
the majority of those have their own wiring closet,” said Goodman.
To guard against any bandwidth issues that arise, Howell incorporates
a central server into his designs.
“Now we bring all the video to one central recorder in that
building and then that recorder will dump at 3 a.m. on a Sunday,
or something, into a central storage unit,” he said.
The Future of IP
While the economy has slowed IP implementation, many agree
that it will become the security industry’s go-to technology in the
future. Demand for IP video has grown 80 percent, while analog
demand has grown 17 percent.
“But if you look at the raw data you see 2.5 million analog
cameras as opposed to 200,000 IP cameras,” Perlin said, so IP
video still has a long way to go. As more and more businesses
implement a networked infrastructure, IP-video deployment
will become more common, decreasing the higher
upfront installation costs. And as the technology matures,
manufacturers will be able to focus more on enhancing
IP-video features, such as IP system control, video analytics
and management functionality.
“Today’s large video systems can provide a deluge of data, but
it takes intelligent, scalable, easy-to-use video control and an
open-architecture, non-proprietary, video-centric physical security
information management software platform to transform all
this data into usable information,” Piran said. “When technology
ties the expansive capabilities of digital video together into a
user-friendly interface, then the immense value of technology
can be unleashed for today’s businesses.”
This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Network-Centric Security.
About the Author
Carla Saavedra is a contributing writer for Network-Centric Security magazine.