Back in 2004, Portsmouth City Council won Security Management Today’s Best Security Partnership category at the UBM Live Security Excellence Awards. The Council’s regular information exchange with the local police service, housing associations, its technical contracting company TM Security and client Southern Co-Operatives was held up as a shining example of collaborative working by the distinguished panel of Judges.
It was always the case that Portsmouth’s CCTV operators were integral to the success of this partnership and, in 2005, they proved as much by duly scooping the Best Use of Technology Award. To win two Security Excellence Awards in successive years is no mean achievement.
Portsmouth’s CCTV manager Ray Stead – who reports to the Anti-Social Behaviour Team’s manager and elements of the Community Safety Team – is directly responsible for the design, strategy, project management and day-to-day running of the Council’s CCTV system. Stead explains that the Control Room has now been up-and-running for ten years.
“I’ve been working on the CCTV system since 1991,” he explained. “We thought about it for four years, preparing Case Studies and planning ahead. For me, that’s what has made the system so strong. Portsmouth City Council bought the CCTV out of capital funds, not grants, and as a result we have genuine and real ownership of the whole set-up. There’s still cross-party support for the CCTV system, which first went ‘live’ in April 1996.”
Monitoring a range of incidents
Stead’s three dedicated CCTV operators watch over an area encompassing 32 square miles courtesy of 24 monitoring screens. As well as the main city centre of Portsmouth, the surveillance regime takes in 14 wards including Fratton, Paulsgrove and Southsea and covers a variety of monitoring requirements.
“We have to monitor a very large range of incident types,” Stead continued. “As a result of that, we work with all of the established ‘prosecuting’ agencies including the Fire Brigade, the police service, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue. We watch shopping centres, bars and residential areas. We’re also involved in traffic management and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR).” Stead’s team members are able to use any of the 152 cameras installed for ANPR on a standard shutter speed if vehicles are moving at speeds of less than 20 miles per hour.
“We have links to the Queen Alexandra Hospital, and with Gun Wharf Shopping Centre, although they have their own self-contained systems. We also watch out to sea – for which we use a different lens size – and have been involved with both inshore and offshore rescues.”
Although buoyed by the two Excellence Awards, Stead has never been one to rest on his laurels. “A couple of years ago,” he explained, “we made a decision that we’d like to improve the overall efficacy of the system by adopting an holistic approach that would make it function in a more streamlined manner.” Everything has to fit into the strategy of the Control Room, it seems, and rightly so.
“If you’re in charge of a Public Space Surveillance system and looking to implement an upgrade that will assist the CCTV operators to be more effective, you need to ask yourself some fundamental questions,” added Stead. “Who’s going to be responsible for managing the system, and how are they going to do that? How will the operators use the system? After all, they’re the key to any effective CCTV regime. If they can’t understand or use its features then it will be a total waste of money.” How true.
Trial tracks uncharted territory
Stead took a step into somewhat uncharted territory by running a four-week trial of what was then one of the latest analytics products available on the market.
Perceptrak from Havant-based Smart CCTV is described in the marketing blurb as “a pro-active, intelligent behaviour recognition system that goes much further than normal surveillance systems”. It will recognise behaviours that could be interpreted as criminal or anti-social, track what is happening and automatically alert the CCTV operators. Operators, then, are able to watch a particular screen and take a decision on the action required.
According to Smart CCTV, the possibilities are endless. “Apply your mind to almost any crime or anti-social behaviour problem and imagine you’ve a system watching the quiet area while you’re busy watching the places that need a constant ‘guard’. Imagine that your smart CCTV system will call you to tell you about the joy riders, or the people gathering in a crowd, or someone wandering with perceived criminal intent between vehicles…”
Perceptrak employs the latest software to analyse images, using anything up to 18 pre-defined criteria such as ‘converging people’, ‘fast car’ and so on. When that software detects something untoward happening, the system sends an alert to the Control Room. This allows the security officers on monitoring duty to make a human decision concerning whether or not to watch the scene and calculate an appropriate and meaningful response. It also ensures that many more scenes are being watched than is normally possible. In this way, the system helps to make Portsmouth a safer and far more trouble-free zone.
During this initial trial, the system was deliberately set up to run alongside the existing CCTV operation. In practice, the new system ran in the background looking at some of those cameras that were not displayed to the operators until the alarm sounds.
One of its tasks, for example, was to monitor a stairwell in a building that should not be used. The system proved that there were between five and ten usage ‘incidents’ per day. Historically, CCTV footage here had been recorded but never reviewed, so up until that point no operational understanding of what was happening within the building had been built up.
In addition, there was a city centre car park not being used at night, so it would have been a waste of the operators’ time (in addition to being boring and tiring) to provide constant monitoring. That being the case, the Perceptrak system was set up to watch for ‘fast cars’ and pinpointed a 14-year-old joy rider taking advantage of the quiet hours. The police were called to the scene and the culprit immediately arrested.
Example 3 – a pub at night – was an interesting Case Study. Each morning at 3.00 am, three people and a van drew up outside a certain pub and the people entered the building. It could have been a criminal gang, but in actual fact turned out to be a cleaning team.
An objective mind is demanded
“We learned something new about our city,” insisted Stead. “All the talk today is about making surveillance more intelligent. That’s fine, but there’s only so far you can go with software. You’ll always need an objective mind to make the final decision. How can a system decide what sort of bag someone is carrying, or watch that person’s body language and interpret delicate nuances in the speed of their movement?”
The Perceptrak evaluation was run as a four-channel set-up, with the images from four cameras being sent into the system. Given the fact that there are 152 Public Space Surveillance cameras in Portsmouth, a Vicon matrix was used to take all of the images rendered by the Tecton DVRs and decide where each should be sent (during the trial, this would be either to a monitor or to the Perceptrak system itself).
The cameras were linked to the DVRs, and then into the matrix (complete with Petards NetPlus Command and Control function for controlling the input channel), potentially via Perceptrak and back out to the operators’ monitors. It enables simple configuring to select a camera to go to a specific monitor. In the Portsmouth example, they could have been five operator positions with touch screens and nine keyboards.
Any one of the 14 devices employed could decide to look at something. For example, you could ask for the images from camera 45 to be sent into the Perceptrak system. That takes the output, analyses the pictures, sends it back into the matrix and, from there, it can be sent to any monitor. In Portsmouth, they were able to use the existing infrastructure to see what was happening in a particular building, but this scenario could vary in other Control Rooms.
Any camera can be switched to any monitor from any one of those controlling devices. Particular operators may be restricted to certain cameras – it’s a hierarchical system, you see. The police may well be specified as one of the recipients.
Stead was at pains to point out: “This is a completely self-contained, analogue network. Internet Protocol (IP) is not used as a matter of course at our Control Room, but it would be possible to take a Perceptrak output as an Ethernet output and configure it to go to the Web.”
The cameras and the Control Room
The cameras monitored by the Portsmouth CCTV Team are, in the main, supplied by Bosch Security Systems and fitted with IP68 housings. The system is networked but not Windows-based.
The whole Control Room (in truth there are two separate, interchangeable Control Rooms) is analogue in nature but can take in Broadband pictures as live video from a site. For example, as in the trial Perceptrak could be set up in a corridor in a housing complex and the parameters set such that it watches specific cameras at certain times.
Although Perceptrak can cope admirably with the digital recording, in this instance Ray Stead needed the system solely for the processing of defined video feeds to support crime prevention and community safety. For example, if a particular car park was problematic the operator could specify that images from the two cameras capable of watching that car park were put through Perceptrak to provide alerts if unusual behaviour was occurring.
“The key is that it’s flexible,” Stead commented. “It’s another tool to help the monitoring process. The difference is that Perceptrak tells you when something’s happening without CCTV operators having or needing to watch those monitors all of the time.”
Smart CCTV ensured that, from the operators’ perspective, everything remained ‘the same as usual’ during the trial. There were no changes made to existing systems, but it gave Stead the opportunity to understand what additional benefits might be realised from having Perceptrak involved.
The important factor was that a given operator could take the image from any camera and use the system to alert over potential incidents – the operator still has to make the final decision to respond and, if necessary, summon the police. Hampshire Police’s policy is that they will not respond to a technology-generated alarm unless it has visual, audio or zonal verification by an authorised person.
Filter for visual alarms
Portsmouth City Council’s CCTV Control Room acts as a filter to visual alarms, making the decision on who needs to be told. Stead opined: “Perceptrak allows us to monitor areas that we cannot justify monitoring live all the time, and thereby improves the efficiency of our live monitoring across the city. For example, the operators might be watching the bars and clubs on a Friday evening as this is where the greatest potential for incidents to take place will be, while the Perceptrak system would be monitoring the quieter areas. The car parks, stairwells or corridors in buildings and the city centre ‘streetscape’ during the hours of darkness.”
Statistics are now available on how many incidents are monitored by Portsmouth City Council’s Control Room, how many tapes are sent to the police, the number of incidents the police respond to and how many arrests they make. “The trial was too short to tell results in these terms,” suggested Stead, “but it gave us a flavour of what we could expect to achieve.”
Stead is keen to explain that the system does so much more than video motion detection. It can tell the shape, size, speed and character of things it is watching. In essence, it deals with behavioural recognition. During the trial, it was found that Perceptrak can even run on the fully-functional cameras. The same cannot be said of video motion detection.
“If we ‘grab’ the camera,” suggested Stead, “then Perceptrak stops, but give it a few moments and it starts up again. We have to get it into the home position. That’s part of the operator training, and it will start up again.”
Following the successful trial period, Stead decided to have the system installed on a more permanent basis to prove proof of concept after improvements had been made to the software, and because of the quantifiable benefits to the Control Room outcomes.
That said, Stead’s philosophy and approach to the system haven’t changed. It’s a modular system – if any part fails, subsystems may be altered and any new components would have to slide in seamlessly with what is already there. Stead wants his CCTV operators to use a basic set of equipment that doesn’t continually ‘morph’. Anything new would have to fit in – as Perceptrak has done – without doubling up on monitors, etc.
Perceptrak has already been used in parts of seven cities across America, in places like New York and Washington DC. Again, the feedback has been extremely positive.
18 different behavioural patterns
Smart CCTV’s managing director Nick Hewitson helped design the version of Peceptrak that Portsmouth City Council is using. Hewitson told SMT Online: “The system we’ve configured filters out all the rubbish video that you don’t want and lets you see the stuff that you do wish to view. In other words, the Control Room manager is using human beings – the monitoring staff – for doing what they do well. That’s making subjective decisions on incomplete data. He or she will also be using computers to do what they do well. Processing lots of boring data.”
Hewitson added: “We believe that Portsmouth is the first fully-installed example of video analytics being used in a city centre Control Room in the UK. As a local company, we’re very pleased to be working directly alongside Portsmouth City Council in providing leading edge technology to make its CCTV Control Room one of the most effective in the country.”
Fittingly, the last word is left to Ray Stead. “There are systems purporting to be similar, but Perceptrak goes one better. It not only picks up 18 different behaviour patterns, but it’s also a flexible tool – you can set the parameters in terms of the different behaviour and times that you need from a particular camera. More importantly, I can assign any fully-functional camera to the system.”
Stead’s parting shot advises Control Room managers to stick to the most important parameters. “How are you going to manage your system? Who is going to be in charge of that process? If you have the right people in the right place and you keep the review system going, then you can’t go wrong. Keep it simple and keep it modular so that it works and you’ll be able to repair it. Computing power is great for data gathering, but skilled CCTV operators should always make the decisions.”
