The refurbishment deal hopes to provide improved monitoring and recording facilities for Reigate, Banstead and Mole Valley Councils.
Work was made necessary by a decision to pool all three councils’ CCTV resources, and under the new scheme Mole Valley’s existing control room at Dorking police station will be decommissioned.
Reigate and Banstead’s joint control room could not deal with the extra inputs from Mole Valley’s cameras and old equipment made upgrading an unattractive proposition. The control room was to be completely re-equipped, replacing the CRT monitors with energy-efficient flat-panel displays and the existing tape-based recording systems switched for modern digital video recorders (DVRs).
The new control room, which is close to completion, will provide two operator stations and 28 19-inch monitors. Two further 40-inch monitors will be mounted in a video wall.
Siemens says programmed operating modes are supported so the system can be arranged, for example, to give priority to selected cameras or groups of cameras at particular times of day.
A new video matrix is also being installed, with a capacity to handle up to 200 camera inputs. Only 120 are currently in use.
The modular DVR system will initially comprise 10 modules, each with the capability of handling 16 cameras. The storage capacity of each module is 1.6 terabytes, which should be sufficient to allow images from all cameras to be retained for the required for 31 days.
To ensure that CCTV coverage is maintained while the new system is being installed, Siemens has planned the work in a number of phases. The first involves setting up a temporary control facility at Reigate police station. The company then plans to co-ordinate work with Surrey Police’s contractors to totally gut the old control room before installing the new viewing screens.
The screens will then be cabled to racks in the adjacent equipment room, where the new matrix and video recorders will be installed. The final step will be to remove the old control equipment and fit the new replacements. The process can be completed in a very short time as all of the required cabling is already in place. Siemens says that only during this brief changeover period will CCTV coverage be interrupted.
Siemens has worked in liaison with transmission providers BT and NTL in specifying necessary upgrades of existing transmission services including leased fibre-optic lines, which are being used to convey images from the Mole Valley cameras to the new Reigate and Banstead control room.
“For us, a key factor is going to be the flexibility of the new system,” said Richard Berryman of Surrey Police.
“This will mean that we can, for example, easily home in on incidents and, if necessary, track people as they move between cameras. We’re also looking forward to the new digital recording system which will not only give us much better quality images than the old analogue installation, but also make it a lot easier for us to find specific images that we want to review.”
