Howth, originally a small fishing village, is now a busy suburb of Dublin, Ireland. More than 2,000 yachts dock at Howth harbor every year for regattas and sea voyages. To ensure visitors’ safety and prevent damages to the luxurious yachts, harbor authority turned to Osmosis Ireland for surveillance solution. After surveying the harbor, Osmosis recommended using 5-megapixel and 10-megapixel network cameras to monitor the vast areas around the harbor. Howth harbor is very big. It would take hundreds of traditional analog cameras to cover the entire harbor. Only 20 cameras are required, if megapixel network cameras were installed.
Howth, originally a small fishing village, is now a busy suburb of Dublin, Ireland. More than 2,000 yachts dock at Howth harbor every year for regattas and sea voyages. To ensure visitors' safety and prevent damages to the luxurious yachts, harbor authority turned to Osmosis Ireland for surveillance solution. After surveying the harbor, Osmosis recommended using 5-megapixel and 10-megapixel network cameras to monitor the vast areas around the harbor. Howth harbor is very big. It would take hundreds of traditional analog cameras to cover the entire harbor. Only 20 cameras are required, if megapixel network cameras were installed.
Following the recommendations of Osmosis, Howth harbor authority chose to install megapixel network cameras at strategic locations. However, the network camera manufacturer had difficulties providing software to manage such a big quantity of network cameras. Standalone NVR could only support one to three units of megapixel network cameras and could not even support 10-megapixel cameras. Osmosis believed PC-based GeoVision NVR was the only solution for this project. Each GeoVision NVR system could support nine 5-megapixel cameras and one 10-megapixel camera, so only two NVR systems were required for this installation.
Each network camera connecting to the NVR uses up memory. Cameras with higher resolutions require higher memory usage. 32-bit Windows operating systems can only use up to 2GB of RAM. GeoVision NVR can be installed on 64-bit Windows operating system, which means Windows can use up to 4GB of RAM. This significantly increases the number of high megapixel cameras that can be connected to a GeoVision NVR system. Furthermore, GeoVision NVR supports compression method, H.264 codec, to record the video streams from the cameras. Compared to MPEG-4 and M-JPEG compression, H.264 codec saves 20 to 70 percent of hard drive space and lowers Internet bandwidth requirement for remote applications.
Phase 1 of the Howth harbor project is now complete. So far, Osmosis installed 10 network cameras at strategic points around the harbor and connected the cameras to a GeoVision NVR system. The harbor authority is amazed how 10-megapixel cameras could capture so much of Howth harbor and asked Osmosis to begin phase 2 of the installation immediately.