Digital eyes the new way to spy

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

There's something very strange about watching people go about their business completely unaware they are being observed. It seems stranger still when you are told that the office workers who are milling around on the screen before you are on the other side of the Pacific, and that you are seeing them in real time.

But to Peter Stothers, chief technology officer at Albany-based Intelligent Vision Systems (IVS), it's just part of the standard demonstration of his company's networked digital surveillance systems.

IVS distributes digital video recorders and associated hardware manufactured by Canadian company March Networks, and we were looking through a camera that is positioned above a corridor at its head office in Ottawa.

There's a bit of snow around but it looks like a nice day there, Mr Stothers remarked, as he switched over to a camera on the rooftop of the same building.

The view from this camera resembled one of the ubiquitous web cams that are to be found all over the internet, except that over a broadband connection there was no jerkiness to the image. The image quality is also much higher - so good that in a recorded sequence we were shown later, you could see individual snowflakes falling.

It's hardly surprising that when Mr Stothers and co-founder, chief executive officer Martin Keogh, started selling digital equipment three years ago, the technology seemed too advanced for the market.

"We were banging on people's doors and they thought we had stepped off an alien spaceship. We got a bit despondent ... "

But last September Auckland-based CCT Equity Investment Partners took a 50 per cent equity stake in the business.

With the backing of CCT, the company was able to relaunch, and it grew from two to nine employees almost overnight.

In the past 12 months, 85 per cent of sales have been digital based.

IVS is about to install its first networked surveillance system in New Zealand as a pilot project for a large corporate customer, but its bread and butter business is in standalone systems.

Better image quality and a higher frame rate, or the number of still images recorded a second, are two of the main benefits of digital surveillance systems, according to Mr Stothers.

Unlike conventional systems, which store footage to standard VHS tapes, March Networks digital video recorders (DVR) save the video to hard disks.

If 16 cameras are connected to a VCR then every camera is going to be updated every 3.2 seconds, but on an equivalent digital system you will get at least one frame per second on each camera.

Mr Stothers says that low frame rates are to blame for the fleeting glimpses of the perpetrators you often see in crime scene video.

"If I'm a crim, in one frame you see me, in the next you don't. Have I gone here or have I gone there?"

Another problem is the management of the tapes. They have to be changed once a day and replaced every year. Also, if an incident occurs, the time to locate video evidence is often underestimated.

On a digital system the hard disk drive never needs to be removed and simply rewrites over older footage when the available space has been used up.

Each DVR can accommodate up to four 80-gigabyte hard disks, or storage of up to 320 gigabytes maximum.

Mr Stothers says it's hard to predict how much storage will be needed for each application, but four cameras set to record at one frame a second for 24 hours hours, seven days a week running for 31 days will take up about 100 gigabytes.

A typical digital installation would cost around $25,000, but a large project for a shopping centre, for example, could be worth $150,000 to $200,000.

Mr Stothers says digital surveillance cameras cost about 25 per cent more than the analogue equivalent, but are cost competitive when compared on the same functionality.

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