The UK is renowned for being the most watched nation in the world. With around five million CCTV cameras, we have one of the highest levels of monitoring per head of any country, and as a nation, we have accepted ubiquitous surveillance as a part of our everyday lives.
However, if the general public actually knew the quality of camera it was supposedly being protected by, it may not be so confident.
The shocking reality is that the technology in most of our existing CCTV cameras is so outdated that it is significantly outclassed by the average camera phone.
Megapixel mobiles
Most people now walk around with at least a 3.1 million pixel (3.1 megapixel) camera in their mobile phones, possibly even five or eight million pixels. Now consider that most CCTV cameras are analogue – a 60-year old technology originally created for producing images on television – and analogue-based cameras have a maximum resolution of only .4 million pixels.
Subsequently, the quality of cameras protecting our airports, town centres, car parks, bus, train and tube stations is eight times less than what teenagers are walking around with in their pockets!
This fact is backed up by the senior police officers who have labelled most of the existing CCTV systems as useless in helping to catch criminals due to poor quality and difficulties in accessing footage either during or after an event.
This, of course, begs the question: why do local authorities continue to spend tax payers’ money on installing CCTV cameras in critical environments that are so outdated and lacking in basic quality? Particularly when there is an alternative in the form of high-resolution digital systems, which can work out cheaper as well as producing massively improved image quality and ease of use?
The difference between digital and analogue capture and transmission is that every single image is a full frame image. There’s no blurring – the same as a digital camera – and the quality of image is vastly improved. To answer the question we must look to the security consultants and resellers. Many successful security companies have been built on installing CCTV systems over the past twenty years, and they are firmly entrenched in the analogue space.
Whole new skill set
The plain fact is that they have made investments in analogue, and aren’t keen to take on new technologies, particularly if it involves learning a whole new skills set. Anyone can screw a camera to a wall and install a cable – but with digital you have to understand a little bit about networks too. As a result, they tell their customers that digital technology is unproven and expensive – when in reality, the opposite is true. Traditionally, cameras only supply the images, while the processing and recording is done later on a central PC using video management software. This traditional centralised structure requires not only high network bandwidth, but also needs enormous PC processing power to support several cameras, rendering them neither cost-efficient nor suitable, due to the large number of PCs required for high-res systems.
A ‘decentralised’ concept – like the Mobotix one* – makes storage computers unnecessary, since the ‘intelligence’ is already integrated in the camera. It incorporates a high-speed computer and, if necessary, a digital memory (SD card) for long-term recording in the camera. The PC is used only for viewing, not for analysis or recording. As a result, such cameras can record events even without a running PC and digitally record videos with sound for archiving purposes. So in addition to encouraging a turnaround in the thinking of traditional security resellers, what else can be done?
Firstly, the government needs to set a minimum standard for the quality of image that CCTV cameras produce, as has already been seen elsewhere in Europe. In France, for example, there are minimum standards which publicly-funded CCTV systems must adhere to.
Secondly, there needs to be a huge education process, not just for installers, but for customers as well. They shouldn’t be kept in the dark by security consultants pushing outdated analogue systems. They should be asking those same consultants, ‘Why are you trying to sell us a technology that was about 20 years ago?’
With London set to host the Olympics in 2012, the UK – and especially the capital – is set to add or replace another four million CCTV cameras over the next few years. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t shed the baggage of an analogue past, and make the switch to digital here in the UK. The cost of the technology is coming down all the time, and the benefits – along with the images – are clear.
* All Mobotix cameras are high-resolution storage with 1536 image lines and 2048 pixels horizontal resolution. This means 48 times more detail for a zoomed segment in stored images than when using standard 288-line technology (CIF, 2CIF). The company says one single Mobotix camera with a 90 deg wide-angle lens mounted in the corner of a room can monitor the entire room with much more detailed resolution than other systems.
* Mike Lewis is UK and Eire country manager at Mobotix.
