With the support of the government, China’s first-, second-, and third-tier cities have all completed the first phase of development, signifying that they have finished the installment of basic video surveillance and alarm systems in their jurisdiction.
With the support of the government, China's first-, second-, and third-tier cities have all completed the first phase of development, signifying that they have finished the installment of basic video surveillance and alarm systems in their jurisdiction. According to Yan-Xin Xu, Industry Consultant at
Hikvision Digital Technology, majority of the first-tier cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, are now entering into the third or fourth phase, On the other hand, many second- and third- cities are in varying stages of development either going through phases two or three.
Ongoing projects are mainly focused on upgrading the existing security infrastructure as 1080p high-definition, or at least 720p, video surveillance cameras has become the standard for safe cities. Previously, closed-circuit monitoring systems were widely installed along with analog cameras.
"With IP and high-definition technology maturing in the security industry, coupled with enhanced network infrastructure, tier-one and tier-two cities have begun upgrading their installed hardware, software, and platforms," said Derek Tan, Director of Integrated Solutions in Asia at
Tyco International. "These include switching from analog cameras to IP cameras and moving to an integrated platform that offers a single, holistic command and control view of all solutions."
Technology Integration Requirements
Chinese safe city developers were faced with the daunting task of figuring out a way to integrate and manage image capture and surveillance systems across different cities and municipalities, which was made even more difficult by the emergence of a number of platform providers who used different protocols and software.
As a result, the Chinese government mandated new safe city projects to comply with a monitoring network technology standard, GB/T28181, which will allow authorities centralized access and monitoring of major events over various platforms. This is particularly important in traffic monitoring systems where before, images and information cannot be shared between or used simultaneously by different government agencies which lowered management efficiency.
Furthermore, another industry standard, GA/T669-2008, also known as "urban monitoring alarm system technology standards," covers not only the front-end monitoring access and information collection system, but also allows for integrated information transmission and transfer, along with management of the entire platform.
High-level Applications and Integrations
Most of China's first-tier and second-tier cities are starting to look beyond network integration and look toward intelligent video surveillance solutions, which require applications that can integrate video surveillance feeds, run intelligent video analysis, and provide cloud storage.
According to KEDACOM, the construction of safe cities has now entered the data-mining phase, citing command centers that the company has completed for the government. "The country has already has more than 50 command centers using image data for further analytics. These were constructed for the Ministry of Public Security's big data platform to assist them in intelligent video analytics and structured analysis of data retrieved from video and image capture systems," elaborated Sher Ye, New Media Marketing Director at KEDACOM. "The data can be reliably and quickly ran via cloud computing and stored using cloud storage. Lastly, the platform also makes it possible for authorities carry out big data video queries, verify them and decide what to do."
One major point of difficulty encountered during the development of safe cities involves the monitoring of moving targets such as people and cars as this is associated with high levels of difficulty. By integrating video surveillance capabilities along with content analysis, authorities are able to create intelligent and effective facial and general recognition systems.
"Traffic data analysis is mainly done through police traffic surveillance cameras and electronic collection gate. To a certain extent, this can also be used to handle traffic congestion. However, serious problems are, of course, handled by intelligent transport systems. Traffic data are mainly sourced by safe city video data," said Xin-Fang Zhang, General Manager, Market Operations Division, PCI-Suntek Technology.
"Facial recognition is mainly used to enhance the security in safe cities, guard against terrorist attacks, as well as investigate criminal cases. Using a mesh network infrastructure is expected to give rise to more facial recognition applications," continued Zhang.