The seven storey, 216 room hotel wanted to upgrade its surveillance capability with the very best available technology, to meet the ever increasing security demands of a central London hotel.
By deploying the IndigoVision solution, the hotel re-used its existing analogue CCTV infrastructure whilst adding advanced features and superior image quality that was not available from the original system, IndigoVision says.
The CCTV upgrade was installed by Astro Communications.
Significant threats
The security threats facing a city centre hotel are significant. Not only does a surveillance system have to aid guest and staff safety, it also has to monitor the security issues around high-profile guests and specific incidents such as walk-in-theft.
It is therefore vitally important to have a flexible surveillance solution that provides the very best image quality and analysis tools.
“The IndigoVision system provides us with an excellent tool for monitoring the security of the hotel,” said Jim Fraser, Marriott Hotel chief engineer. “The video quality is superb and the facilities of the video management software are far superior to what was achievable with the old CCTV system.”
Live and recorded
Control Center, IndigoVision’s IP video and alarm management software, is used by the security operators to view live and recorded video from all of the cameras in and around the hotel.
A single PC running Control Center software replaced all of the original analogue control room equipment and at the same time provided a suite of tools for viewing and analysing the video.
Over 30 days of video recording is achieved using IndigoVision’s standalone Network Video Recorders.
Evidential quality
“The analysis tools allow us to quickly identify recorded footage of an incident, even well after the fact,” said Fraser. “Following a recent hit-and-run incident on one of our driveways, we were able to quickly identify the relevant footage and export evidential quality video for the Police.”
Astro Communications reused all of the original cameras and coax cable infrastructure for the Marriott hotel project. The original hardware switching matrix was replaced with IndigoVision’s 8000 transmitter/receiver modules that convert the analogue camera feeds into DVD quality MPEG-4 digital video for transmission over a local IP network, to which the Control Center workstation and NVRs are also connected.
The combination of Control Center and the IP network creates a ‘virtual matrix’, that provides far more flexibility and scalability than a traditional hardware matrix, IndigoVision says.