Frankston city council delivers a wide range of safety services to the local Frankston community. One of the safety services is to provide a safe taxi rank for late night club and hotel patrons with a safe location for waiting for a taxi. The taxi rank is manned by security staff. By adding CCTV coverage to the taxi rank, the council is able to identify sequences of events and identify the perpetrators of anti social activities.

The council originally had a camera mounted to the nearby civic centre and recorded the taxi rank via a telephoto lens and a VHS recorder. Image quality was very poor and lighting made the images almost unusable.

In order to give the council good images to assure effective surveillance, Evolve Corporate Security (ECS) provided a solution with 2 units of the ACTi day & night camera CAM-5120 and Milestone XProtect Software.

The first ACTi camera was positioned to identify people entering and exiting taxis as well as capturing the registration number of each taxi. The second ACTi camera was positioned to monitor the head of the taxi and those in line.

There was no existing network infrastructure at this location and a wireless solution was the only answer, with this in mind, bandwidth and throughput were of prime concern. From ECS's experience, ACTi cameras can always give the ability to use smaller data streams and maintain D1 resolution from the cameras with a choice of frame rates.

"ACTi's MPEG-4 IP cameras give us the ability to provide our clients with a reliable IP based solution supporting full D1 resolution, in addition we are able to take advantage of usable frame rates and maintain lower bandwidth usage. During the commissioning process stake holders in the project were very impressed with our live and recorded images" says Glenn Radford, technical sales specialist at Evolve Corporate Security.