Utilising one centralised main-control room and a series of thirteen secondary control rooms, the prison is at the forefront of video surveillance solutions in France.

Mr. Samir Rekik, R&D Engineer at Aris Technologies Company (video solution designer and integrator for this project) explained the initial, and overall, goal of this solution was to "convince customers that a new open solution based on Hikvision equipment provides both a robust, and economically superior, model to older versions . and all with a setup that does not require any special technical knowledge in its day-to-day operations."

Immediately, installation of the outdoor analogue box camera and the indoor vandal proof dome camera provided a noticeable security upgrade. Previously, where inmates were able to utilise natural elements – such as changing lighting conditions … or even the cover of night … to engage in suspicious behaviour – this was no longer possible. Mr. Rekik explained: “the two models were such an upgrade that security operators actually had as good night time contrast and sharpness as they did in the day.”

Both cameras utilise a variety of functions, such as a day / night auto switch, a 1/3” Sony CCD, auto white balance, auto gain control, electronic shutter control, and backlight compensation to achieve this result. Additionally, due to their differing aims, the Hikvision box camera sports an auto iris with DC / video driver function and 540 TVL resolution; where the vandal proof dome camera comes equipped with a compact design for unobtrusive indoor placement, vandal proofing to deter inmate tampering, and a low illumination functionality of 0.1Lux @ F1.2.

As Mr. Rekik summed up, this Hikvision technology resulted in a sharp reversal of the prisoners’ prior experience: "Earlier prisoners had a greater degree of autonomy once the sun went down, but now security personnel had the advantage. In fact, inmates quickly learned that even though they assumed they were unobservable – the truth was very different. Hikvision cameras allow security to view them just as easily at midnight, as they do at noon."

In this solution, both Hikvision video servers and video decoders are used providing system stability. Additionally, Hikvision 16-ch Standalone DVRs are also utilised to directly record camera footage before it passes through to the video servers and, ultimately, the network. Thus recording is completely independent from the network. Furthermore, the standalone DVRs are also used as an additional means to deliver H.264 IP video streams; and can be used as backup in case of any video server failure – allowing built-in redundancy, data protection, and additional system stability. As Mr. Rekik pointed out, "The result is a secure recording solution that is independent of specific network performance."

La prison de Lille-Annoeullin utilizes these Hikvision components over a ring multicast local area network and a distributed optical fibre system that adds resiliency to the network. For the moment all the devices are connected thorough the ring LAN to allow full multicast video streams from any camera to any monitor inside the prison. The system is getting continuously bigger by easily adding cameras, DVRs, video servers, decoder and monitors.