Middle East video surveillance technologies gain traction

Along with the push from the gradual stabilization of oil prices and economic conditions, the Middle East security market has been evolving along with strict IP surveillance regulations which cover all aspects of security solutions, from camera specifications to storage requirements.

The demand for surveillance solutions continue to be a big trend for securing people, premises and property. “2017 saw a strong growth in some Middle East markets like UAE, Oman and Kuwait while also seeing a decline in other markets. Infrastructure, hospitality, residential and commercial were the strong performers for Hanwha Techwin while the verticals that saw a decline were industrial and retail. We had good success with some of the major events and developments in UAE,” said Fakhri Limdiwala, Business Development Manager at Hanwha Techwin. “The hospitality and residential sectors looked for cost-effective solutions while the infrastructure vertical saw a strong affinity towards products with increased intelligence and performance.”
This has encouraged companies to introduce new technologies tailored towards the unique needs of this region.

“We strengthened our offering in key verticals like oil and gas, industrial and infrastructure with the launch of new explosion proof cameras, stainless steel cameras and thermal cameras. We enhanced our low light offering with the launch of eXtra Lux series cameras. Powered by our Wisenet 5 processor, 1/1.9” sensor and the world’s first F0.94 lens, the eXtraLux offers color video even in low light conditions,” said Limdiwala. “We also increased our solution base by launching special algorithms for addressing the customer needs such as image stitching, face recognition, parking management, transportation etc. We entered in the fast growing multi-directional and multi-sensor market by launching several new products. Our PNM series of multi-directional products are based on X series platform and offers uncompromised performance when it comes to frame rate, low light, WDR and resolution on multi-directional cameras.”

Niche technologies such as thermal cameras continue to see a demand in the market, with additional features that can stand up to the harsh weather conditions.

 

“Thermal cameras are ideal for situations that need maximum situational awareness and early object detection — for example perimeter protection of airports, critical infrastructure or monitoring of bridges, tunnels or borders. They provide visibility even in challenging environmental conditions, like for example in case of smoke, dust or fog. We also offer the feature of metadata fusion in one of our cameras (our MIC IP fusion 9000i) which is a ruggedized PTZ camera — It fuses the metadata of the camera’s built-in optical and thermal lens and helps users to focus on ‘invisible’ things that need attention. This way, even if the optical lens is blocked by smoke, the thermal one can automatically trigger an alarm and still deliver a thermal image of what’s going on,” said Erika Görge, Corporate Communications for Bosch Security Systems.

Retail Sector Demand Evolving

One sector that has shown significant growth is retail. End users are waking up to the vast possibilities of expanding their focus to beyond just security. They are looking toward leveraging data to help them make business decisions, decide how many people should be assigned at the store, and maybe even do fire alarm detection.

“We see around 95 percent of the demand coming from retail. Our cameras offer wider angles that can help retailers save on camera quantity and cost. And the business intelligence of video content analysis (VCA) is the technology that customers are asking for. That is why in the future, we are developing the unique people counting cameras and we are planning to include business intelligence features inside the camera — such as motion detection, queue management and other retailoriented features,” said Gabriel Yang, Operation Director for VIVOTEK Middle East.

Regulations Driving the Market

The market has continued to evolve in parallel with local regulations, especially with regards to camera specifications to storage requirements. Frost & Sullivan’s “Overview of the Middle East Commercial Security Market” report stated that security camera installations have now become mandatory for nearly all sectors, with current video standards specifying the use of 2- to 3-megapixel cameras with Wide Dynamic Range to enable clear and comprehensive video coverage. This has encouraged manufacturers to bring in and highlight technology that can help manage this data.

“We see the demand for higher resolution. There are regulations coming into play where we will be replacing and moving away from 720p as the introduction standard to 1080p. Another regional requirement is longer retention times, you see that especially in these markets. Sometimes 30 and 60 days would be enough but the local authorities request three to six months quite often for most big projects and key points,” shared Ettiene Van Der Watt, Engineering and Training Manager for the Middle East and Africa at Axis Communications. “This is where we can talk about Zipstream which is a smaller algorithm which works in the background on areas of interest that enables the end user, which is typically your authorities, to benefit from savings on bandwidth and storage.”

"It was critical that we applied H.265 with IDIS Intelligent Codec. With motion adaptive transmission (MAT) customers can save up to 90 percent on storage and bandwidth no longer making them an issue when transitioning to Full-HD or 4K resolution. In addition, IDIS Intelligent Codec means forward

and backward compatibility as users can view in H.264 and record in H.265 meaning they do not need upgrade hardware immediately to reap the storage and higher resolution benefits. This remains a big market differentiator and what were pain points for many end-user customers, and we can take those concerns away,” said Peter Kim, Senior Director and Head of Global Technical Support Center for the Global Business Division at IDIS.

As users in the region are looking to increase the amount and quality of video surveillance collected, the cost and importance of storing the video data rises along with it. “Governments are determined to continue to improve security. We see longer video retention across all countries. We also see less tolerance of downtime and loss of video, which will drive the high availability requirements and the recording visibility requirement to ensure no video is lost,” said Sean Chang, CEO of Rasilient Systems.

According to Chang, Rasilient’s NFD series of products are specifically designed for largescale mission critical infrastructures, especially for verticals like banking and city surveillance. “The patented solution addresses the video recording quality while scaling up to 1000 HD cameras and 1PB storage — with few high density chassis. The visibility of storage ‘busy’ and dashboard ‘framedrop’ meter ensures the system recorded all the video. The AI-based Proactive feature detects the flaky drive before it actually fails and recommends cloning. This eliminates the double drive failure risk, which has been the primary cause for massive video loss with RAID technology.”
 
To help minimize video footage loss resulting from sudden connection failures between the IP camera and the NVR, IDIS introduced its Smart Failover function which enables the camera’s SD card to begin recording “auto-magically” in these cases and automatically transfers the data to the NVR to fill the recording gap when connection is restored. “There’s hardly any user interaction or intervention that is required. That’s a smart feature. Not every camera is important. Out of 32 cameras, four cameras may be more important. For these four cameras, you can provide almost an equivalent protection for network or NVR failure, guaranteeing 24 hours, SDXC compliant, 2TB per camera,” said Kim.