Indigovision’s local partner Brink’s (Mauritius) Ltd worked with the prison’s management team to identify the ideal solution to make sure all parts of the prison could be seen, and incidents spotted immediately.

Fifteen 9000 PTZ cameras and 104 analogue cameras have been put in place, connected to six NVR-AS 3000 network video recorders and 104 standalone transmitter/receivers. Recording is 24/7, and retained for two months. Activity controlled framerate (ACF) is used, with a bitrate of 512kbps for recording.

The Indigovision network now covers every single area of the prison, and gives greater coverage inside and out than the previous network. Indigovision’s integrated motion detection, alarms and mapping is also a major advantage, letting operators quickly spot problems and identify exactly where things are happening, while playback of recordings is easy and immediate.

“The Indigovision network gives a real bird’s eye view of all that’s happening inside the prison – in rooms, corridors and gathering areas, and also outside in the parking lots and round the perimeter – while the alarms and motion detection make sure nothing is missed. It’s a vast improvement on security, with two remote control centres ensuring maximum security control in all areas,” says Brink’s Mauritius project manager Vikash Augnu.

Workstations are located in the prison’s main control centre and also in the main gate and towers. A new network LAN has also been installed, using both fibre and FTP cables.

The compact NVR-AS 3000 Network Video Recorders have a small footprint but are powerful recorders. They can record up to 20 cameras at full frame rate with audio and simultaneously play back up to 20 cameras, with extremely low power consumption and heat dissipation.

ACF controls the framerate of the camera video stream based on the amount of motion in the scene. When there is no activity, video is streamed over the network at minimum framerate. The instant motion is detected the video is automatically transmitted at the maximum configured framerate. This significantly reduces the bandwidth and NVR storage requirement for cameras monitoring generally static scenes or during quiet periods such as at night.

Indigovision’s technology was chosen because it is simple to use, and known to be stable and reliable. The tough environment needed a robust solution that was easy to install and maintain. Image quality was also a key factor for guards monitoring a large number of prisoners.