Used by 10 different police forces in cities and districts throughout the province, the systems are helping the authorities to better manage traffic and increase public safety through the use of help points.

“Since 2005, we have installed over 2000 Indigovision video encoder modules throughout the province, which are being used to connect analogue cameras to the network,” said Jiang Weining, General Manager, Yunnan Dongpu Technology Ltd, Indigovision’s authorised partner responsible for the design and installation of the various systems. “To date, the failure rate for all of Indigovision’s products has been zero. This excellent reliability record makes it much easier for us to maintain the current systems and promote the technology to others, as can be seen by the fact that 10 different police forces have adopted it.”

Located in Southwest China, Yunnan province covers an area of nearly 400,000 km3 and has a population in excess of 45 million. The largest system, with over 1000 cameras, has been installed in the Province’s capital, Kunming City. Other large installations include Anning City Police, who have deployed 700 cameras and Chuxiong City with over 100. The cameras are mainly installed at road junctions, residential access areas, tunnels and other public areas with a large flow of population.

The police monitor their respective areas from a series of control rooms and traffic management centres using PC workstations running ‘Control Center’, Indigovision’s video management software (VMS). Indigovision’s distributed architecture allows video to be streamed directly from cameras to workstations without the need to go via a central server. This reduces the network bandwidth usage and delivers video with extremely low latency, allowing operators to smoothly control PTZ cameras over long distances. The distributed architecture is key to the easy deployment of multiple police control rooms around the network.

Indigovision’s technology also supports fully-synchronised two-way audio, which is transmitted alongside the video. This feature is being used by a number of the police forces in public help points. In the event of an incident or traffic accident members of the public can alert police operators simply by pressing a ‘help button’. This instantly raises an alarm on a ‘Control Center’ workstation and displays the nearest camera feeds to that help point. The operator can then talk to the person directly over the network using the audio capability. The ‘help button’, microphone and speaker mounted in the help point are connected directly to the nearest Indigovision encoder module. This simple facility extends the eyes and ears of the police surveillance teams and helps improve their response to public safety issues and traffic situations.

Full framerate video is recorded 24/7 for 30+ days using Indigovision’s Windows network video recorder (NVR) software, running in each of the control rooms. NVRs can again be located at any point on the network to reduce bandwidth usage. For improved redundancy, backup NVRs are installed alongside the primary NVRs. In the event of an NVR failure or during routine maintenance, the backup will automatically take over recording of the appropriate camera streams while the primary is offline. Evidential quality, tamper-proof, video clips can be exported for use in investigations and in court.