La prison de Lille-Annoeullin, a new prison in northern France, opened in July 2011, with one central control room and 13 secondary ones. According to surveillance solution designer and integrator Aris Technologies, the overall goal was to “convince the customer that a new, open solution based on Hikvision equipment provides both robustness and cost savings, without requiring any special technical knowledge,” said Samir Rekik, R&D Engineer.
La prison de Lille-Annoeullin, a new prison in northern France, opened in July 2011, with one central control room and 13 secondary ones. According to surveillance solution designer and integrator Aris Technologies, the overall goal was to “convince the customer that a new, open solution based on Hikvision equipment provides both robustness and cost savings, without requiring any special technical knowledge,” said Samir Rekik, R&D Engineer.
Products chosen for this project included analog box cameras, analog vandal-proof dome cameras, stand-alone DVRs and video servers. Installation of the outdoor analog box camera and the indoor vandal-proof dome camera provided a noticeable change. Previously, inmates were able to utilize natural elements – such as changing lighting conditions or cover of the night – to engage in suspicious behavior. That is no longer the case. “The two models render security operators good nighttime contrast and sharpness as they would get in the day,” Rekik explained.
Both models each features a day/night auto switch, a 1/3” Sony CCD, auto white balance, auto gain control, electronic shutter control and BLC to achieve such nighttime performance. “Prisoners used to have a greater degree of autonomy once the sun went down, but now security personnel have the upper hand. Inmates quickly learned that they are no longer unobservable at night.”
Reliable System Uptime
Hikvision's 16-channel stand-alone DVR, single-channel video server, and single-channel video decoder provide an equally important element: system stability. “Since this is a prison, any issues of instability must be reduced to a bare minimum,” Rekik said. Interface response time is also kept under 300 milliseconds, as a great deal of information is being processed each second. “After we had tested a number of brands, we found there were no system crashes or memory lapses associated with Hikvision; our choice was obvious.” Hikvision DVRs are utilized to directly record camera footage before it passes through to the video servers and, ultimately, the network. Thus, recording is completely independent of network availability, ensuring built-in redundancy, data protection and system stability.
La prison de Lille-Annoeullin utilizes these Hikvision components over a ring multicast LAN and a distributed fiber-optic system that adds resiliency to the network. In particular, the video server supports TCP, UTP, RTP, multicast, DHCP, PPPoE and HTTP; while the video decoder supports up to four-screen circle decoding, with a configurable sequence group feature.
For the moment all the devices are connected thorough the ring LAN to allow for full-multicast video streams from any camera to any monitor inside the prison. With scalability preplanned, the system can be easily expanded by adding cameras, DVRs, video servers, decoders and monitors. Using these five Hikvision components and one software program VIRIX (virtual matrix) developed by Aris, this solution offers operational simplicity and low maintenance that ensure the required reliability in an application of this nature.