The Polish city of Pleszew has seen a drop in crime since upgrading its analog surveillance with a complete IP video surveillance solution from IndigoVision. The new system gives the local police extended coverage, excellent evidential quality video and the ability to improve their incident response.
The Polish city of Pleszew has seen a drop in crime since upgrading its analog surveillance with a complete IP video surveillance solution from IndigoVision. The new system gives the local police extended coverage, excellent evidential quality video and the ability to improve their incident response.
Speaking to a regional newspaper on the installation of the new surveillance system, Pleszew City Council spokesman, Marcin Konieczny said, "The new system meets the council's expectations and the crime rate has dropped significantly since the moment it was installed. The City Council is now planning to expand the system with additional cameras by the end of the year."
The challenge for the council was to increase the coverage of the city's surveillance, while at the same time improve the video quality. This was not possible with the original analog system. The evidential quality video delivered by IndigoVision's system has enabled the police to identify people involved in criminal activity and parking infringements and has shortened the prosecution process, saving the authorities time and money. The police have also noticed a dramatic drop in acts of vandalism and graffiti in the monitored areas.
The equipment and technical support for the project was supplied by IndigoVision's authorized partner, MIWI-URMET, who used local systems integrator ABM Alarm for the installation. Twelve cameras were installed across the city on a dedicated fiber network. The cameras were mainly external PTZ models, with four cameras being used from the original system. IndigoVision's advanced video compression ensures that minimum bandwidth is required to stream high-quality video across the network. This also means that latency is low, allowing the PTZ cameras to be smoothly operated — even when controlling the furthest cameras, which are located 5 kilometers from the police station control room.
Police officers use a dual monitor workstation running Control Center, IndigoVision's security management software, to monitor the cameras and to view and analyze recorded video, which is archived on an IndigoVision Windows-based NVR. The NVR has 2 TB of storage providing the police with 30 days of recordings.
The analog cameras are connected to the network using IndigoVision's transmitter/receiver modules, which also incorporate hardware inputs that can monitor external equipment. In an innovative use of this feature, local peripherals such as network devices and power supplies are monitored for failure, through the digital input at each camera. In the event of a failure an alarm is raised in Control Center that automatically drives the nearest PTZ to a preset position to view the equipment. This allows operators to check that the failure is not being caused through vandalism.