Safe and efficient buildings created by unified systems

It is crucial for residential and office buildings to account for the safety of people and property inside them. With increasing living standards and fierce competition between businesses all over the world, facility managers, security managers, and building owners are incorporating smart technologies in their design and daily operations to improve the safety, comfort and productivity of their building occupants.

 

Buildings, especially residential and office buildings, share similar security needs, such as video surveillance for situational awareness and investigations, alarm management and intrusion detection, access control and visitor management, and also smart parking. However, integration of systems from multiple vendors can make things too complicated, more costly and less efficient. Building operators are looking for comprehensive security solutions that would include basic components for safety and efficiency, ranging from the most general security needs to advanced intelligent functions that improve management efficiency and user experience.

 

 

A video surveillance system is the foundation of the whole building security solution, however, traditional video surveillance systems work in a passive way to merely record images, and the security personnel may easily miss anomalies when without timely reminding. By the time incidents are noticed, losses may have already occurred.

 

Here, the security operation of a building needs to transfer from passive response to proactive response. A proactive video surveillance system can smartly detect intrusion behaviors and automatically trigger alarms to alert security personnel to carry out real-time video verification. This is very valuable in reducing manual patrol costs and avoiding losses in advance. 

 

A good example is the collaboration between a video surveillance system and an emergency door. An emergency door is used for accidents such as fire, and has an access limit that is not set in the same way as other doors. When the door status panel senses that an emergency door has been opened, the proactive video surveillance will automatically pop up for security personnel to check what happens and decide whether to take further action.

 

And now the Deep Learning technology is being applied more in video surveillance systems, enabling them to effectively distinguish humans from animals, leaves, wind and other interference elements. This can effectively reduce false alarms.

 

 

In the case of access control with card and fingerprint identifications, it often happens that people are blocked outside doors and awkwardly wait for a “rescue” when they forget or lose cards, or their hands are full, or when their fingers are banded with band-aid. Meanwhile lost cards may also lead to safety risks as strangers can enter into the building if they find them.

 

An access control system that recognizes faces will be a good option that will free people from the awkward situations mentioned above, allowing them to pass by doors or barriers with unique face identification, and avoiding worries of lost cards. For office buildings, an access control system with face pass feature can be enhanced with a time attendance function, providing precise attendance statistics for human resource departments. 

 

 

Visitor management is another headache for buildings, as both convenience and safety need to be considered. On one hand, the security management needs to collect visitor information and try to limit them to necessary areas, but on the other hand, residents and companies hope their visitors can have a pleasant and convenient experience throughout their visit.

 

A flexible visitor management system will help balance the two demands. It enables residents or office staff to authorize limited permission to visitors and allow them to only enter certain areas, depending on different visit purposes. Visitors can also have a convenient experience with multiple ways to register their visits, including online pre-register, on-site manual register and interactive visitor register terminal.

 

And setting elevator permission control is also an effective way to partition visitors and keep them in relatively limited floors, since visitors can only go to floors where they have been authorized. With face and card identification, the elevator control system can work easily and efficiently to take people to their destinations.

 

 

Every day, vehicles regularly enter and exit from parking lots of residential and office buildings. Effectively and precisely identifying these vehicles, allowing registered vehicles in and out, and charging parking fees, is complicated to manage.

 

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) has been a popular approach for smart parking systems, and it is efficient and convenient. ANPR cameras at entrances and exits can first identify whether the moving target is a car or not, then automatically read its license plate. The ANPR servers can decide whether to allow the car to enter or exit, and record parking time, location, direction, and the license plate number of the vehicle. 

 

In the parking lots, parking cameras can be used to automatically monitor the use of the car park along with the availability of spaces. Then a dynamic lighting indicator system directs drivers to a specific space available – reducing customer parking times and creating an experience where drivers always find a parking space quickly.

 

Through analysis of vehicle entrance and exit data, the smart parking system can help improve efficiency of operations, by providing data such as how many cars will come in and go out in one day, when is the busiest time, and how long a car will stay on average.

 

 

The last, but the most important thing, for an efficient building security solution is the integration of systems. It can be costly and inefficient to use separate management systems for building security operations, and any incompatibilities can also increase risk of false alarms. 

 

Ideally, a comprehensive building security solution should support integration of video surveillance, alarm handling, access control, elevator control, visitor management, and smart parking systems. 

 

With unified systems, system management and security operations are centralized, and data can be shared among different systems. The modular design of solutions is needed here to support functional component expansion. Users can easily add new components on the same platform to meet new requirements of security operation teams while keeping costs under control.

 

With unified systems, a building security solution can work as a whole to create a safe and efficient environment for both work and life.