Video Surveillance Goes Digital
Here is an interesting article from NetworkWorld Article about the growing popularity of IP-based digital surveillance systems. The article also features a German company that uses Video Telephony over IP (use of SIP and Internet video codecs) to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed by such a system.
Video surveillance has traditionally been a closed-circuit analog affair run by the physical security staff. But with the rise of IP-based digital systems, video surveillance has become another application on the corporate network managed by the IT department.
Going IP makes sense. This allows companies to re-use the same networking infrastructure for data, voice and now video security. Companies can now focus on building really good and stable IP-networks and interconnect any number of applications over it. Pouring capital investment to where it matters the most. This provides a significant amount of savings and infrastructure simplification.
In the local scene, a company Neugent Technologies is pioneering work on the Philippines by building entire IP-based digital surveillance systems. They have been at it for quite sometime and have been making headway by released three (3) major product lines already. From little standalone systems to fully integrated multi-camera systems. They have a wide array of solutions and also provide customization services for special requirements.
Lastly, I also gave a presentation during a PLUG Linux Tech Session at the Ateneo de Manila University early this year. In this session, I discussed the open source side of digital video security. There are quite a number of open source tools already out there. Of course, none as comprehensive as their commercial brothers … yet. So definitely, there are a lot of developments in this space.
