SEN October 2015

OCTOBER 2015 ISSUE 370

FACE RECOGNITION l Manly Council’s Mobotix Pipeline l SA Councils Share $450k CCTV Fund l Inner Range: Inventing the Future l The Interview: Per Bjorkdahl ONVIF l New Product: 2GIG Go!Control l Perimeter Security: Beam Me Up l Monitoring the Internet of Things l Review: Dahua IPC-HFW4800EP 4K l New Product: SCSI DirectConnect

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editorial S EC U RI TY E L E CT RO N I C S & NETWO R KS O CTO B E R 20 15 ISSUE 370

COMMON SENSE MUST PREVAIL

W

HILE thinking about the monitoring segment this month and the nature of the internet of things, I got to thinking that electronic security has long combined sensing technologies in multifarious ways and the future of key parts of the industry revolves around expanding these sensing capabilities as much as possible.

Security electronics has always been a heady mix of technologies.

Covering solid state analogue electronics, fibre optics, building management solutions, access control, lighting, cameras and optics, communications, voice recording, video analytics, video storage, perimeter detection technologies, and a raft of sensors from flood to fire, electronic security systems have always offered surprising technological diversity. They’ve also long offered the potential for serious data gathering at multiple layers.

A few moments of reflection recently convinced me that not only is this diversity unlikely to disappear, the industry needs to continue to broaden its reach. New sensing solutions designed to offer greater protection of public space are now available, IVA has never been so clever and the range of sensors, including Z-wave sensors, is becoming ever larger.

Smart sensors of the future will be able to take on multiple detection roles from

By John Adams

For the electronic security industry to keep a step ahead of low cost bundled solutions, its systems need to be better than ever and that means the R&D function must remain within the industry.

motion and lack of motion (medical), as well as vibration, dangerous chemicals and biohazards. Not long ago it would still have been a long shot to talk about CCTV cameras as edge devices incorporating video analytics, thermal imaging and edge storage capability. But these developments are all here, now.

Then there are UHD CCTV cameras. No, they’re not for every application but combined with smart compression techniques they offer astonishing flexibility in terms of high resolution at wide angles of view and the depth of field delivered by these units is extraordinary. Every new release offers improvements in areas of comparative weakness – low light performance and storage demand.

The combination of capable IVA and UHD would be a wonderfully powerful tool for many applications.

Along with high quality speed domes in 1080p and 4K, we are also seeing solutions that combine multiple cameras in single housings to give 360-degree fields of view. And as this higher resolution development goes on, the characteristics of the best 1080p IP cameras filter down to compact variations.

It goes without saying when you talk about bringing together sensing devices and subsystems that integration remains a major issue and as electronic security systems get smarter, it seems integration

becomes an ever more important element of the complete solution.

Progress is being made. If the digital revolution has given security managers anything it’s the growing ability to drive security sub systems from a single workstation.

As cabled and wireless bandwidths improve (it’s a slow process to be sure), it’s likely the trend towards the integration of enterprise solutions will accelerate. Meanwhile, improvements in network performance, particularly across the public domain, will make cloud solutions ever more appealing across a range of applications.

We’ve talked over the past couple of years about the momentum gathering in the video analytics industry. Many solutions are now nicely aligned with user expectations and given improvements in camera resolution, practical applications of IVA should go on improving rapidly in the coming years.

It’s important that improvements in all parts of the market continue to flow through. For the electronic security industry to keep a step ahead of low cost bundled solutions, its systems need to be better than ever and that means the R&D function must remain within the industry.

There’s going to be a big temptation to take on a new breed of alarm systems manufactured by IT manufacturers over the next couple of years but there’s zero chance this move will not end in ubiquity. zzz

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22 38: STANDARD BEARER

22: SURF MOVIE Manly Council is using 100 Mobotix cameras along with Mobotix software solutions, including MxControlCenter and MxActivity Sensor firmware, which combine to form a system of flexibility and power.

28: SA COUNCILS SHARE $450K CCTV FUND A $A2 million State Government plan to promote safer public spaces for the community over the next 4 years will see 7 South Australian councils share $A450,000 in grants to install CCTV systems, security lighting and other technologies to improve safety in local crime hotspots, provided they match the funding dollar for dollar.

30: INVENTING THE FUTURE Faced with a future as diffuse as it will be challenging, Inner Range is deploying its considerable engineering capability to offer installers, integrators and end users a greater range of ever more flexible solutions.

OCT 15

Per Bjorkdahl is director, business development at Axis Communications and chairman of the ONVIF Steering Committee. His dual roles give him a unique perspective on the video surveillance market.

46: 2GIG GO!CONTROL 2GIG Go!Control, distributed locally by QSS, is America’s biggest selling alarm and automation panel, so it’s no surprise I was keen to get a look at this system.

54: BEAM ME UP In many applications there’s nothing better than pushing an electronic security solution out of buildings towards the perimeter. And the most affordable way to do this is by wiring quality perimeter detection devices directly into intrusion detection systems.

62: DAHUA IPC-HFW4800EP 4K Dahua’s IPC-HFW4800EP 4K bullet camera proves good things do come in small packages.

We like 4K at SEN and this PoE IP66-rated bullet, with its 4mm lens and IR support, proved to be a super little camera.

70: SCSI DIRECTCONNECT New from SCSI is DirectConnect - a fixed-IP 4G service that links field devices including CCTV, access control or any IP device via SCSI’s

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72 private and secure network using a standard 4G router and a SIM. DirectConnect is ideal for remote applications that need a secure connection.

OCTOBER 2015 ISSUE 370

72: VAPOURWARE Cloud, that vaporous construct of marketers and human imagination, holds many installers, integrators and end users in thrall but they’d feel more relaxed if they simply defined cloud as ‘someone else’s computer’.

regulars

FACE RECOGNITION PP 100001158

l Manly Council’s Mobotix Pipeline l SA Councils Share $450k CCTV Fund l Inner Range: Inventing the Future l The Interview: Per Bjorkdahl ONVIF l New Product: 2GIG Go!Control l Perimeter Security: Beam Me Up l Monitoring the Internet of Things l Review: Dahua IPC-HFW4800EP 4K l New Product: SCSI DirectConnect

SEM1015_1cover.indd 1

30/09/2015 3:48 pm

Publisher Bridge Publishing Aust. Pty Ltd ABN 11 083 704 858 PO Box 237 Darlinghurst NSW 1300 tel 61 2 9280 4425 fax 61 2 9280 4428 email info@bridge publishing.com.au

14: NEWS Latest business, product and technical news from Australia and around the world.

58: MONITORING The global industrial internet of things is coming, driven by demographics, as well as by the pursuit of new revenue streams. Is the electronic security industry ready? Surprisingly so, and may benefit in multiple ways.

76: EDITOR’S CHOICE What’s new from our manufacturers.

80: HELPDESK Our team of electronic security experts answers your tough technical questions.

Editor John Adams Advertising Manager Monique Keatinge Customer Service Annette Mathews tel 61 2 9280 4425 annette@bridge publishing.com.au Design Tania Simanowsky e: taniasdesign@ optusnet.com.au Subscriptions 11 issues per annum One year (11 issues)

Australia 12 months $A104.50 (incl GST) 24 months $A188.00 (incl GST) Overseas 12 months $A155.00 (incl GST) 24 months $A270.00 (incl GST) WEBSITE www.securityelectronics andnetworks.com.au No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form in whole or part without prior written permission of Bridge Publishing.

Infiniti at Sunshine Coast University Hospital p.16 Seadan Techie Brekkie Feeds Installers Technology p.18 Gallagher Protecting World Trade Center p.20

NEWS IN BRIEF OCTOBER 2015

JOHN NOWACKI APPOINTED CSD NSW STATE MANAGER John Nowacki

COMPILED BY JOHN ADAMS

GENETEC WINS AUCKLAND AIRPORT CCTV UPGRADE

■

GENETEC, as part of the Datacom AIAL bid, has won the Auckland International Airport CCTV system upgrade. The integrator is Datacom VSA, which already handles significant work for the airport. Genetec Security Center will be installed in support of the existing 800 video surveillance cameras installed at the site, as well as being integrated with Auckland Airport’s CEM access control system.

The Genetec solution will incorporate LPR and camera numbers are slated to rise over the next couple of years from 800 to 1500 cameras as part of the expansion of the site. Along with new installations, analogue cameras are being replaced with IP cameras at a rate of around 30 per year. The current system is built around Panasonic

analogue cameras, which perform surprisingly well in the challenging variable light of Auckland Airport. They’ll be networked using Panasonic encoders.

Auckland Airport operates 24 hours, 365 days a year. It’s the second busiest airport in Australasia – only Sydney is busier – and it handles more than 14 million passengers annually, around 40,000 passengers each day. Across the 1500Ha site are hotels, car parks for 6500 vehicles, workshops, fuel storage facilities, administration buildings, huge airport terminals and all the rest. Remote cable runs here are measured in kilometres, significant buildings are numbered by the dozen. On the access control side there are more than 1000 access readers and 14,000 cardholders.

JOHN Nowacki has been appointed to the position of state manager, NSW for CSD, following the establishment of its new product management team, headed up by Mark Edwards.

Having started his career in the electronic security industry as an apprentice back in 1978, Nowacki’s experience covers the spectrum from technical, through to sales and management roles in more recent years.

“We are continuing to build the CSD brand across the country and with John Nowacki’s appointment within the NSW team, continued success and growth is expected,” said Peter Grimshaw, CSD’s national sales manager.

“New South Wales is an important market for CSD and we are looking to build an even stronger team to support those sales.

“Notching up 37 years in the security industry this year, John brings a wealth of knowledge to the role and as NSW state manager, he will be a valuable asset to the team.”

NSW TRAINS PLANS CCTV AND CHIPS n NSW Trains has released a tender for the rollout of a decentralised CCTV and Customer Help and Information Point (CHIP) capability to regional

14 se&n

railway station and coach stop locations with the first phase of this deploying to 22 regional NSW locations.

NSW Trains currently utilises the Sydney Trains

CCTV and Help Point Systems within the Sydney Trains rail network area, which includes locations north to Hamilton and throughout the Hunter,

South to Nowra, South West to Goulburn and West to Lithgow. But there is no CCTV at any regional NSW Trains stations beyond the Sydney Trains rail network area, with the exception of Coffs Harbour Station.

According to the tender brief, CCTV and CHIP functions at these regional locations will be primarily used for customer support and post event analysis by the NSW Trains Regional Customer Support Centres (RCSC) located at Maitland, Katoomba and Wollongong, the Daily Operations and Continuity Centre (DOCC) and will also be available

locally at each station to be used by station staff for monitoring, investigating safety incidents, customer complaints, criminal offences and operational issues.

CCTV monitoring will also be jointly used by the existing Sydney Trains Security Monitoring Facility (SMF). The system will need to be compatible with the overarching Sydney Trains CCTV and Help Point System as NSW Trains intends to ultimately migrate the solution into the overarching Sydney Trains CCTV and Help Point System. The tender closes on October 21.

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From Tyco Security Products

NEWS OCTOBER 2015

ASIAL 2015 AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INDUSTRY AWARDS JUDGED

INFINITI AT SUNSHINE COAST UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL n INNER Range’s new enterprise solution Infiniti is being installed at Sunshine Coast University Hospital by Schneider Electric in partnership with Inner Range.

Sunshine Coast University Hospital is a new public hospital being built by Lendlease, with Schneider installing the building management, access control and security systems.

Infiniti is the enterprise version of Inner Range’s Integriti IP-based access control and security solution and the finished system will comprise around 2000 access controlled doors, with around 200 doors at the greenfield site having been

fitted with Inner Range’s SIFER readers so far.

According to Inner Range’s Russell Blake, Sunshine Coast University Hospital is a massive project but what makes it so exciting is that there are multiple high level interfaces.

“Infiniti is running the security and access control – it integrates with the Pelco CCTV solution – then there’s the BACnet BMS and fire system, Jacques intercoms; a Stanley RTLS system which includes mother/baby tagging, mobile duress, personnel tracking, and patient wandering; and there’s a messaging system integration and a nurse call system. Another great integration is an AGV – an

automated guided vehicle.

These move around on a track delivering messages and medications and they need to get through access points.

“Infiniti is being used as the management solution for all these subsystems, graphical maps and SNMP monitoring, too,” says Blake. “This means Infiniti is the alarm aggregation point for the access control and security system and the sub systems, and if the network fails, Infiniti is the alarm management point for the entire site.

Essentially, Infiniti is a PSIM at a fraction of the price.

“It’s been great working with Schneider – their work is immaculate. For

THIS MEANS INFINITI IS THE ALARM AGGREGATION POINT FOR THE ACCESS CONTROL AND SECURITY SYSTEM AND THE SUB SYSTEMS, AND IF THE NETWORK FAILS, INFINITI IS THE ALARM MANAGEMENT POINT FOR THE ENTIRE SITE.

instance, there are 200 custom-made aluminium back planes which house controllers, power supplies and switches. Technicians in the Schneider workshop set up these units by hand for shipping to the site and setup. For us this is fantastic. It’s everything we’ve been working towards for a long time – it’s just a huge thing for us.”

Sunshine Coast Public University Hospital will be a tertiary teaching hospital, servicing the Sunshine Coast region, as the hub in an integrated network of accessible healthcare.

The hospital will open with approximately 450 beds in 2016 with the remaining capacity – giving a total of 738 beds – expected to be commissioned by Q4 2021. The hospital has been planned to allow further expansion up to a total of 900 beds.

QSS DISTRIBUTING SOME HOT STUFF n QSS, which distributes FLIR’s range of optical IP cameras, also carries FLIR’s thermal range, including the economical

16 se&n

and powerful TCX thermal bullet and mini bullet cameras. According to QSS’ Rob Rosa, the company distributes and supports

the entire FLIR optical and thermal camera ranges.

“FLIR’s optical HD IP camera range is affordable and capable,” Rosa said.

“And we complement this optical range with FLIR’s thermal solutions.”

According to Rosa, the FLIR thermal range includes the new FLIR TCX Bullet and Mini Bullet cameras, which combine 24/7 high-contrast thermal video and highperformance built-in video motion detection (VMD) with a level of affordability that the industry has never

seen in thermal.

“FLIR thermal cameras give you the advantage to see clearly in complete darkness without any illumination, in bright sunlight, through smoke, dust or even light fog,” Rosa said.

“Delivering intrusion detection, video alarm verification, lighting control, people counting, retail traffic flow and queue management, TCX enables a whole new range of applications for thermal imaging.”

John Fleming

THIS year’s Australian Security Industry Awards for Excellence and Outstanding Security Performance Awards, along with the Outstanding Security Performance Awards have been judged, with scores in the process of being collated. The awards will be presented later in the year.

The panel comprised a group of experienced technical and security management judges who spent time going through each of the large number of submissions prior to meeting. The ASIAL Security Industry Awards were handled first, with submissions reappraised by the panel before a group assessment was made.

Needless to say, the judges did not always agree but the panel contained a good balance of informed opinion and knowledge and found its way to a consensus.

Awards included those for gender diversity, indigenous employment, individual achievement in general security and technical security, product of the year in categories including access control, alarms, CCTV, alarms and communications/ transmission. Also judged were awards for special security event or project and best technical security solution over $A100,000.

When it came to the Outstanding Security Performance Awards – judges allocated scores based on their individual assessments as part of prior reading of submissions and much discussion. The aggregated score sheets of the judging panel will be used to determine the award winners.

The Easy Way to Protect and Connect Home

Alarm.com delivers comprehensive, proven connected home solutions for your customers.

Now available with DSC’s ImpASSA v1.3+, a comprehensive all-in-one security panel, you can offer peace of mind and a complete connected home experience with the ultimate in ease-of-use, convenience and control.

• Complete home automation, energy management and video service offerings • Dedicated cellular communication • Image Sensor integration • Easy device enrollment • Access to exclusive features such as Geo-Services and Smart Schedules™

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IS214

For more information contact Alarm.com (international@alarm.com) or your local DSC distributor (info@dsc.com)

From Tyco Security Products

NEWS

SEADAN TECHIE BREKKIE FEEDS INSTALLERS TECHNOLOGY

OCTOBER 2015

INNER RANGE CHANGES THE GAME WITH AS 2201.1 CLASS 5 n ONE of the standout developments at Security in Government 2015 was the unveiling of Inner Range’s AS 2201.1 Class 5 platform. Fundamentally, AS2201.1 Class 5 includes encrypted communications from sensor to controller, to keypad. Up until now, government organisations requiring encryption of all parts of security system communications needed to install more costly SCEC Type 1/1A solutions.

“Only a small handful of vendors have products that meet Class 5. Inner Range is now a highly competitive supplier in this space, it’s big news,” said Inner Range’s Russell Blake.

“Taking Class 5 solutions to the high security market is very exciting for us.

“In terms of our product portfolio, we have our ‘Integriti’ commercial security and access control range, ‘Infiniti’ for enterprise access control and ‘Infiniti Class 5’ for high-security applications.

Government users and security consultants I have spoken with have said the

costs for an installed Type 1A system typically exceed many tens of thousands for just a few security sensors.

“Class 5 gives them almost all the security features of Type 1A but at a much lower cost and may be used in many of the installations where only Type 1A systems have been able to fulfil the site’s requirements in the past.”

The way Inner Range’s Class 5 works is that Inner Range ELM’s (End of Line Modules) are embedded into third party PIR’s, reed switches or other security related input devices. The ELM is wired into such an input device, handles tamper and alarm conditions, and connects via an encrypted RS-485 serial connection to a special Inner Range Class 5 Expander. Bus data and expander to the control module are encrypted to AES-128, as are comms from control module to keypad.

“What this means is that the entire circuit all the way back to the

Russell Blake

reed switch or PIR is fully encrypted – that’s a fundamental point the AS 2201.1 Class 5 standard requires,” says Blake.

“Comparatively, SCEC Type 1A requires similar technical solutions to Class 5, plus a little bit

more. Some government agencies and security consultants are saying, “our risk assessment shows that this site can utilise AS2201.1 Class 5 instead of SCEC Type 1A – we will still have our encryption and much more budget to play with.”

MORETON BAY COUNCIL EXPANDING CABOOLTURE CENTENARY LAKES CCTV

n MORETON Bay Regional Council is expanding CCTV at Caboolture and Centenary Lakes in Queensland at a cost of $A800,000. MBRC has gone to tender for work, which includes installation of conduits, pits, poles, cameras and directional

18 se&n

drilling to King Street fibre network connection within the Centenary Lakes Park Sporting Precinct at Caboolture.

According to the Courier Mail, council will install 22 extra cameras in Redcliffe and Caboolture at a cost of more than $A800,000.

Council allocated funds in its 2015/2016 budget which was handed down earlier this month. There will be 9 new cameras installed at Redcliffe’s Bee Gees Way, which is being upgraded.

Another 13 will be placed at Caboolture’s Centenary Lakes Precinct and the

Caboolture Sports Centre.

Meanwhile, cameras at Redcliffe’s Settlement Cove Lagoon and at the Burpengary Community Sportsgrounds will be upgraded.

The Courier Mail reported Moreton Bay mayor Allan Sutherland said it was a worthwhile investment.

“Infrastructure upgrades and additions to council’s CCTV network are an investment in the safety of our community and the visitors to our region who make a positive contribution to the local economy,” he said.

“The investment, which has been made possible with assistance of the Australian Government, will help to make the Moreton Bay region an even better place to work, live, play and visit.”

PILOTED in Melbourne, Seadan hosted a Techie Brekkie demonstrating Dahua’s HDCVI technology with fresh coffee and breakfast rolls recently.

According to Seadan, finding time out of their busy days to see new technology or the latest product innovations was proving difficult for integrator customers. All were interested but time poor and reluctant to turn work away. Turning to a previously proven successful formula, Seadan re-introduced Techie Brekkie.

Seadan staff said they were astonished as they watched van after van pulling into the car park to take advantage of the short demonstration and free breakfast.

“It’s a winning formula” said Ian Harris, one of the managing directors at Seadan.

“Our customers - the integrators, technicians and tradies – want to know about the latest security technology but simply don’t have enough hours in the day to fit in demonstrations and training.

“Every month, Seadan’s Techie Brekkie can give them a free comprehensive overview of what’s new in the security industry, a bit of breakfast and coffee and then off they go to their first project of the day. It starts at 7.30am and they are out by 8.00am. It works for everyone.”

Seadan Security & Electronics is running free Techie Brekkies every month in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth on the second Tuesday of each month.

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NEWS OCTOBER 2015

SOUTHWEST MICROWAVE SCORES SCEC ENDORSEMENT n SOUTHWEST Microwave has been awarded government approval

by Australia’s Security Construction and Equipment Committee (SCEC) for its INTREPID MicroPoint II FenceMounted Detection System, MicroTrack II Buried Cable Intrusion Detection System and Microwave 330 Digital Volumetric Microwave Link.

As a standing interdepartmental committee reporting to the Attorney General’s Protective Security Policy Committee, the SCEC was established by the Australian Government to develop and implement guidelines for protection of Australian Government resources. The SCEC is responsible for the evaluation of security equipment for use by Australian Government departments and agencies.

With this certification, Southwest Microwave’s INTREPID suite of detection technologies have been successfully vetted against stringent government-mandated criteria for the protection of high security and administrative security applications, making them

OUR INTREPID PERIMETER INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEMS ARE RELIED UPON THROUGHOUT AUSTRALIA AND WORLDWIDE TO MITIGATE RISK OF ATTACK AGAINST SECURITY-SENSITIVE GOVERNMENT, ENERGY, CORRECTIONAL, TRANSPORTATION AND INDUSTRIAL FACILITIES

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Australia and worldwide to mitigate risk of attack against security-sensitive government, energy, correctional, transportation and industrial facilities,” said Bob Kirkaldie, Southwest Microwave’s director of sales.

n GALLAGHER Security’s PIV (Personal Identity Verification) solution will be installed for 2 federal agencies at the World Trade Center in NYC. “We are honored to be chosen to secure the federal government in such an iconic building,” said Brandy Sloan, Gallagher’s business development managerfederal. “The World Trade Center complex is symbolic of the American spirit and stands among the most well-known skylines on the planet.”

Gallagher partnered with eVigilant Security for their expertise in FICAM-compliant security installations.

“We’re very proud to work with Gallagher to deliver world-class security solutions for our federal clients. The World Trade Center sites require end-toend encryption that meets strict federal standards so Gallagher’s next-generation products are the perfect fit for these projects,” said Dave Einsig, VP of sales and marketing for eVigilant.

Gallagher’s PIV Solution offers customers a hardware warranty, the ability to update end devices remotely and a fully encrypted solution that performs PKI authentication without the need for external hardware modules.

GALLAGHER PROTECTING WORLD TRADE CENTER

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MANLY COUNCIL

SURF MOVIE Manly Council is using 100 Mobotix cameras along with Mobotix software solutions, including MxControlCenter and MxActivity Sensor firmware, which combine to form a system of flexibility and power.

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ERCHED on a beautiful peninsula just 7 nautical miles north-east of Sydney, Australia, lies the suburb of Manly, land of the Guringai people. Famous Manly Beach is a mere stone’s throw from the central business district, and with the stunning Northern Beaches region on its doorstep, this coastal municipality boasts a perfect combination of world-class surfing, heritage buildings, and a vibrant and bustling town centre. It is a highly attractive residential location and tourist destination alike, welcoming around 6 million visitors each year.

However, in more recent times, Manly had become famous for all the wrong reasons. The lively entertainment precinct is somewhat

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of a social hub, not only for locals, but also for holidaymakers, backpackers, and young people from the surrounding areas. In recent years, serious concerns about increasing levels of anti-social and violent behaviour, much of it alcohol-related, led Manly Municipal Council to install CCTV. After close consultation with the local police force to identify trouble spots, the reins were handed over to the council’s IT department which then developed the system. There are now more than 100 Mobotix cameras in place throughout the suburb. In a coastal area such as this, it is simple to also monitor remote areas thanks to the Mobotix

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MANLY COUNCIL

MxActivity Sensor firmware, which comes standard with every camera via the 4.1.6 firmware upwards.

The low energy consumption and minimal bandwidth load of Mobotix cameras means Ethernet cabling is usually all that is required to create a network and supply power, but the Manly site was too large for such a solution. Instead fibre optic cable was laid to carry data back to the main NAS storage and PoE was provided by means of power injectors, mainly using light poles as an energy source. Wherever several cameras were installed in close proximity to one another, airbridges created a network between them,

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meaning a single fibre optic cable could carry signals from several devices.

“The main reason we chose Mobotix,” explains Kevin Shea, systems administrator at Manly Council, “is because the cameras needed to be able to withstand extreme conditions, such as high temperatures, torrential rain storms and the damaging salt air. And, because we are a government agency, we were also looking for an economical solution which could offer excellent image quality in all light and weather.”

Mobotix has delivered on all counts. Larger, high quality images are recorded using fewer cameras than traditional video solutions, and the cameras have proved to be extremely low maintenance and robust.

Managing such a large surveillance operation is simplified with Mobotix MxControlCenter (MxCC) video management software. Its user-friendly interface makes controlling and configuring cameras easy and offers a myriad of sophisticated post-processing and analysis possibilities, including MxCC’s time search facility. In just a few clicks footage from one, or several, cameras can be found and viewed. More importantly, the timeserver synchronisation used to achieve this meets court standards, so that the footage can be used as evidence and the superior quality of the highresolution images maximises the chances of positive identification.

A LARGE NETWORK Mobotix technology has not only helped make the streets of Manly safer, it has also played a significant

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MANLY COUNCIL

The main reason we chose Mobotix is because the cameras needed to be able to withstand extreme conditions, such as high temperatures, torrential rain storms and the damaging salt air.

role in promoting the positives about the town. The high quality recordings have been used to market a diverse array of events, including the Christmas carols and the Hurley Australian Open of Surfing (AOS).

Widely hailed as the birthplace of Australian surfing after Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii brought his famous surfing exhibition to Manly in the summer of 1914/15, the AOS has really put the town on the international surfing map. Modelled on the famous US Open of Surfing in Huntingdon, California, the festival of surfing, art, music, fashion, and skateboarding attracts upwards of 100,000 visitors and is a major highlight of the local calendar.

“Constructing the festival site takes around 10 days, so we use the cameras to keep an eye on things whilst it is being built,” Shea explains. “And this year we gave the footage to the surfing festival promoters who used it to make a time-lapse film of the construction.”

A Mobotix camera is also keeping Manly’s tiniest residents safe from harm, watching over the only breeding colony of the endangered Little Penguin to be found on the NSW mainland.

Manly Council has successfully implemented and managed a large-scale CCTV operation. Easy to install and configure, and low maintenance, the solution has proven itself economical and capable of weathering the harsh outdoor coastal conditions over many years. Mobotix technology has played an important role in making Manly safer, and in protecting and promoting all that makes the place so special. zzz

N EWS RE P O RT SOUTH AUSTRALIA

SA COUNCILS SHARE $450K CCTV FUND A $A2 million State Government plan to promote safer public spaces for the community over the next 4 years will see 7 South Australian councils share $A450,000 in grants to install CCTV systems, security lighting and other technologies to improve safety in local crime hotspots, provided they match the funding dollar for dollar.

A

S part of the South Australian Government’s safer public spaces program, Adelaide City Council will receive $95,000 for its Improving CCTV Outcomes Project, which aims to reduce the incidents and seriousness of crimes against the person (including alcohol-related violence) through improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Adelaide City Council’s monitored City Safe CCTV network.

This project has 2 key aspects, firstly, the implementation of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) software for recording and reporting on KPIs relating to the performance of the CCTV network and operators (who monitor the network) and secondly, the trial and implementation of video analytics software on the network. Video analytics is designed to learn usual behaviours based on the motion flow in a camera’s field of view. Once a scene’s normal behaviour is established, the software will alert security personnel to abnormal event detection, such as vandalism or theft.

Meanwhile, the District Council of Ceduna in South Australia has invited expressions of interest for the supply and installation of CCTV cameras and associated infrastructure in Ceduna. New digital CCTV cameras funded in part by a grant of $53,000, will be installed in the Ceduna central business district and Ceduna Airport, in addition to 2 wireless mobile cameras. Ceduna’s project will include the installation of monitoring, recording and control hardware at the Ceduna Council office and the Ceduna police station.

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The City of Holdfast Bay will receive $60,000 for its Holdfast Bay Costal CCTV Upgrade. While the northern part of Holdfast Bay (Glenelg) has developed its CCTV coverage due to the dry area and entertainment precinct, the south of the jurisdiction has fallen behind. As Brighton and Seacliff (also dry areas) are significantly growing in popularity, Council will use its $60,000 funding to help broaden its surveillance network to include identified areas both along the coastal walk as well as in some prominent coastal reserves.

The City of Mitcham will use funding of $25,000 to install CCTV cameras and associated lighting at Windy Point car park to reduce vandalism of council property and improve community safety.

Meanwhile, the City of Salisbury will use $35,000 to assist the funding of a project to enhance security related infrastructure via improved lighting, CCTV capabilities and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) landscaping to support safer place activation of Salisbury Oval, Memorial Street, the Seniors Centre and RSL, directly linking Salisbury Interchange. The proposed CCTV and related elements will assist in discouraging ongoing crime and anti-social behaviours and help to encourage greater active community use and ownership of these facilities.

At the same time, $88,000 in funding will go to the Salisbury CBD CCTV Net project to enhance security-related infrastructure via increased CCTV surveillance within the Salisbury CBD area, encouraging increased place activation of the city centre between Anne and Gawler Streets, incorporating most access routes directly feeding Salisbury’s CBD. The Flinders Ranges Council will use its $50,000 funding for its CCTV for our Communities project, which will see the installation of CCTV in the Quorn and Hawker communities to enable council to promote community safety and reduce anti-social behaviour such as hoon driving and vandalism.

Finally, $80,000 funding will help pay for the City of Mount Gambier CCTV Project, which will upgrade and extending the City of Mount Gambier’s CCTV surveillance camera system. zzz

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S P E CI AL RE P O RT

INNER RANGE

Vin Lopes

INVENTING THE FUTURE Faced with a future as diffuse as it will be challenging, Inner Range is deploying its considerable engineering capability to offer installers, integrators and end users a greater range of ever more flexible solutions.

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UMANS are analogous beasts. When you’ve been commentating on an industry long enough, the scope for temporal contrasts becomes gravitational. There’s a danger every story you write necessarily begins with the words: “When I first visited…”.

Here, it’s a position governed by the need to provide context to a vibrant international business whose manufacturing facility was once a line of trestles in the warehouse of an industrial complex and a row of heads bent over green glass-epoxy circuit boards as though meditating on the doctrines of access control.

The building has changed but the intensity of Inner Range’s focus remains, diffracted by the lateral explosion of digital technology – the commercialisation and expansion of the internet,

BY JOHN ADAM S

A key release coming soon is Inception, a browser-based access control and intrusion panel with local intelligence and an onboard web server. Inception is designed to be simple to use and simple to install, and offers remote management to installers and end users. the electronic expression of automated functionality flowing seamlessly from a time long before my hot summer visit late 1991, towards whatever the future will be. For Inner Range engineers there is no concept of ‘now’ as an emergent property of the river of time – the past and the future are endlessly connected.

Being Australia’s leading electronic security engineering house, a position attained and maintained over many decades, gives the company’s inventions special importance. Where does Inner Range see the market in the future? Where is its R&D spend going? Where should installers focus their expertise? Where should end users invest in infrastructure?

Talking with Inner Range CSD group directors, Alf Katz and Vin Lopes, is an enjoyable business. For directors of a company this large and successful, both are highly technical and entirely immersed in their technology. Katz and Lopes have different cognitive processes but they are of one mind, answering questions together, expanding or appropriating one another’s sentences, seamlessly seizing and ceding the conversation as we rove through key solutions Inner Range has in development and pre-production.

the layered texture of a market which is able to be anything it wants, can no longer be corralled by the application of a label.

Even sitting around the boardroom table at Inner Range is instructive. Piled across the blonde timber are circuit boards, power supplies, housings, reader bodies, controllers – the moraine of hundreds of meetings flowing in from an engineering department hungry for open space in an ecosystem populated with skyscrapers of control boards, workstation-workbenches ablink with a nightscape of LED lights.

One of the interesting things about Inner Range is the company’s caution when it comes to new releases. It took many years to understand the basis for this caution was the pushmi-pullyu of backwards and forwards compatibility. This does not mean some clunky hat-tip to tech gone by, but

Takeover module

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S P E CI AL RE P O RT

NEW SOLUTIONS After the successful release of IP-based security management system Integriti - a process which began in earnest 4 years ago - Inner Range has been working on a number of key solutions. In their own way, each gives a sense of the company’s feel for the future and together they suggest that while predicting the future is complicated, there is a clear shape.

For a start, the underlying technology that comprises Integriti has been woven into the Infiniti enterprise solution, a move that has taken Inner Range into the big league when it comes to major corporate and government solutions in Australia.

This is big stuff for Inner Range, whose earliest solutions were site-based.

Along with Infiniti, there’s Infiniti Class 5, which offers encrypted data comms from sensor to keypad to meet AS2201.1 Class 5 and government standards.

Alongside these developments, a web browser for Integriti has been developed.

A key release coming soon is Inception, a browserbased access control and intrusion panel with local intelligence and an onboard web server. Inception is designed to be simple to use and simple to install and offers remote management to installers and end users.

Next, there’s a cloud-based alarm and home automation panel that the engineering team calls SkyGuard. This is an important move for Inner Range, which has never proffered a system at this level before. SkyGuard combines 433MHz security devices with Z-wave automation devices, integrated 3G and an RJ-45 port for good measure. Management of SkyGuard is via app.

Also managed by app is an automation module that can be linked to a number of major alarm panel brands, providing Z-Wave automation capability and remote management. And behind all these is SkyTunnel, Inner Range’s proprietary

Skyguard

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INNER RANGE

Alf Katz

cloud solution, designed to side-step the hassles of negotiating prickly firewalls.

SKYGUARD First up, we take a look at SkyGuard, which is a Z-wave security and automation panel that Inner Range is developing in conjuction with an overseas partner. To my eye it looks very much like a networking device – a standard domestic vertical router fronted by a neat LCD keypad and an app.

“With SkyGuard, we have a technology with a high level interface compatible with existing Paradox panels and legacy panels from a number of other manufacturers,” Vin Lopes explains. “This residential alarm panel is very simple to use – all that code’s been done.

“Alarm Monitoring with SkyGuard will come into central stations through the Inner Range Multipath pipeline – so any central station with Multipath gets this as well,” he says. “The Z-wave automation notifications go out directly to the customer’s internet connected devices.”

In terms of hardware, automation is Z-wave, the PIRs are 433MHz, the keypad is Bluetooth, and there’s a 3G module option and an integrated Ethernet port.

SkyGuard is expandable to 96 alarm inputs and 8 automation devices, which is about right because as Alf Katz observes, you would not want 100 batterypowered devices adding complexity and expense to what is fundamentally a traditional 8-zone panel with some remote control and management.

Then there’s the takeover module. This module connects to a number of different alarm panels and will be sold through installers, turning those panels into something like SkyGuard.

“The module simply wires onto the keypad bus so an installer is required to handle that part of it,” explains Katz. “This makes the module ideal for installers who wish to sell Z-wave automation to existing alarm panel customers. We needed an

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offering in this space – this offering mixes security and Z-wave without the need to remove serviceable alarm panels.”

INCEPTION Of great interest to the majority of installers, is Inception, which has been under development for a couple of years now. The control board is buttoned up inside a grey poly housing with clearly marked terminations, which shares its design cues with the T4000 Multipath module. The controller has up to 4 doors and 8 inputs onboard, and expands to 32 doors and 512 inputs using Integriti LAN modules and according to Lopes, Inception is a product that is going to go to war in the commercial market.

“Inception is nearly ready – the hardware is finished and final refinements are being added to the software,” Lopes explains. “Release is expected in Q1, 2016, and will come after a searching round of useability tests. Inception will be available to everyone and is designed to simplify the task of installers who need to give their clients access control and alarms. The programming, including the database programming, is browser-based and it’s powerful and very easy to handle.”

Long-time users of Inner Range Concept controllers will have no trouble placing Inception in the context of the company’s product line up.

“Inception targets where you would have put a Concept 2000 or 3000,” says Alf Katz. “As long as the system is not too big, this is self-contained – no server on site anywhere, the customer and the installer can access it via browser and it’s really affordable.

“It fundamentally follows the Inner Range traditional model of integration of access control and security. You can use it as a security-only system, you can use it as an access-only system, or you can mix and match the two. It does all the intruder and access control stuff that 90 per cent of systems require and it tries to do them really well, doing away with all the corner case options and the enterprise options that

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make installing and managing the system harder – like high level lift interfaces and pager control.”

Lopes interjects.

“Anything that’s quirky – get yourself to Integriti but for 70-80 per cent of smaller solutions, Inception is perfect and there should be very little need for tech support – the software is so intuitive,” he explains.

“With the number of corner case options kept to a minimum, it takes very little time to go through and set up an entire system. There are no instances where you need to check these 4 things to make 1 feature work. You just program your way through it out of the box and it works.

“Inception hosts its own web server onboard and can be accessed via the local network over Ethernet or with WiFi. But it also has the option of being connected to our SkyTunnel cloud infrastructure so any internet connected device can go via SkyTunnel to Inception.”

According to Katz, SkyTunnel is about connecting things together so installers don’t have the hassle of negotiating firewalls or worrying about public IP addresses.

“With SkyTunnel, you don’t need a public IP address – the device makes outbound connections to SkyTunnel like a laptop connecting to a web site and is routed in a way that removes the need to punch holes in firewalls,” he says. “This dramatically simplifies connections as well as making them more secure. We use industry standard, approved encryption and authentication methods, and the bandwidth required by our connections is minimal.”

“You are at the cutting edge with cloud – how challenging is it to get this right?” I ask.

“Doing cloud is hard and to deploy cloud technologies economically you’ve got to negotiate licensing models that need to be offset against revenue to support those fees,” Lopes explains. “You have to bear in mind that with Inception, what we are talking about is not access decisions being made in the cloud or data storage in the cloud but just connectivity to Inception via the cloud, a simpler, more secure and leaner model.

“We are also looking at a future Integriti variant, where Inner Range provides a Cloud service that allows integrators, or even end customers to manage their Integriti controllers from a piece of software in the Cloud solution. Of course the controllers would still be standalone with full functionality during

Interestingly, we wondered ourselves whether people would want their access control and security data being managed by a third party in the cloud but we keep getting asked for it.

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those inevitable times when a cloud server cannot be contacted.

“Interestingly, we wondered ourselves whether people would want their access control and security data being managed by a third party in the cloud but we keep getting asked for it. Certainly cloud is new to the market and we have needed to do some redesigning underneath but we will market secure, stable cloud solutions very soon. Thankfully, Inner Range, with its Multipath cloud experience has a head-start in this area of technology.”

INFINITI The next solution we look at is Infiniti, which according to Lopes is Integriti with a different topography that’s separated in terms of its selling model.

“Infiniti follows the selling model of larger enterprise solutions from some of our competitors in which if you are the dealer for that site you are the only person who can purchase Infiniti licenses,” Lopes explains. “Infiniti is not a product that’s available across the counter. You still buy it through your CSD account but it’s dispatched from Inner Range.

“In terms of hardware, you get 8 doors per controller, which is similar to competitors. Infiniti has an enterprise architecture – so it’s IP between controllers, with 8 doors in the cabinet, so if a specification says the system has got to be IP, you can use Infiniti Access Controllers (IAC’s), which instead of having zones, have doors – that’s the difference in architecture.”

According to Lopes, Inner Range and CSD will only sell Infiniti to a certain grade of integrator – that integrator will need to understand IP and the product or they’ll have trouble with installations, he says.

“This sales model is actually appealing to larger users who have more complex applications and who

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want to limit and filter the companies that can quote for a high end tender,” Lopes explains. “It means an organisation is not forced into a position where they are obliged by a fixed tender process to take the lowest quote from an installer they don’t believe is capable of handling the job.

“If we only sell Infiniti to companies that are technically capable and large enough that it’s certain they won’t go broke half way through a job, the customer needing a very large and complex solution gets some surety and some protection – they can be certain they will get an enterprisecapable integrator.”

Alongside Infiniti, Inner Range has developed Infiniti Class 5, a solution that meets the equipment requirements of AS2201.1 Class 5, allowing it to be specified for certain government applications that demand communications be encrypted from alarm sensors to keypad.

“Infiniti Class 5 is now available and there has been serious interest in it,” explains Katz. “Again, Infiniti Class 5 is going to be limited to a small group of highly capable integration companies. It relates to a level of trust we need to maintain with the government in terms of the integrators who have access to the technology they depend on for high security applications.”

Lopes chimes in.

“Basically, government agencies have said they don’t want Class 5 available to everybody in the market so that has to be taken into account - it’s not allowed to be across the counter at CSD,” he explains. “So, Integriti, which is the basis for Infiniti, is available over the counter to anyone who has done the training but these high security paths to market are more controlled.”

When it comes to further expansion of Integriti capability, Lopes says Inner Range is really excited about the new web interface, that’s being installed first at Sunshine Coast University Hospital. The web interface virtually provides a thin client view into the Integriti server allowing remote administration of Integriti systems via a web browser. The interface has full support for both mobile and desktop environments.

“This Sunshine Coast project is quite strategic for us as it is enterprise in scale and it incorporates 18 high-level third party interfaces and takes Inner Range to another level as a manufacturer,” says Lopes. “We have partnered with Schneider on this project and have been really impressed with the capabilities of their organisation and the calibre of their people.”

Sitting in my chair, with the beating heart of Inner Range’s engineering department visible through the window of the boardroom, the layers of old and new product across the table suddenly jolt me, in the middle of a detailed explanation of SkyTunnel, into recollection of computer scientist Alan Kay’s piercing observation: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” zzz

T H E I N T E RV I EW

PE R BJ O R K DA H L W I TH JOHN ADAMS

STANDARD BEARER Per Bjorkdahl is director, business development at Axis Communications and chairman of the ONVIF Steering Committee.

His dual roles give him a unique perspective on the video surveillance market.

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O

NVIF was founded in 2008 by Bosch, Axis Communications and Sony to provide a framework for the development of interoperable IP-based security products. It’s now unquestionably the leading global standardization organisation for IP-based security solutions and has contributed enormously to interoperability over the past 7 years. The standardization organisation now has 500 members and around 5000 conformant security products, with more than 1300 new products completing conformance to one of ONVIF’s IP profiles in the past 12 months.

Far from being a paper tiger, ONVIF has developed a series of key profiles, including Profile S for streaming video, Profile G for recording and storage, Profile C for physical access control, Profile Q for easy installation and advanced security features, with Profile A for advanced access control configuration just having been released to the market for comment. For ONVIF Steering Committee chairman Per Bjorkdahl, the work of the organisation will never really be completed.

Q: Has ONVIF succeeded in opening manufacturers to each other’s products?

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T H E I N T E RV I EW

PE R BJ O R K DA H L W I TH JOHN ADAMS

A: End users and installers in the industry expect basic interoperability when they make purchases of electronic security solutions, and manufacturers are responding by making more interoperable products using ONVIF’s profile specifications. There is no end to this process, no final objective to standardize everything. I don’t think that lies within anyone’s interest.

If you standardize too much you start taking away innovation. But you want underlying standardisation. Imagine if every light in your house had a different fitting – it wouldn’t work. Or consider the battery industry – when watch batteries first came out every manufacturer made their own and you had to search for the exact match. Now they are standardized and it’s much easier.

ONVIF set out to lay a good foundation that is strong, that works, that does not have an ambition to kill innovation – it has to be more than shape and size that differentiate products. And although Axis is a technology leader, we support this 100 per cent.

Q: ONVIF has established industrywide standards that allow cameras, DVRs, NVRs and video management systems to work together but I feel in the past 18 months there’s been a return to the proprietary model in certain areas. Some installers say tying the multiplicity of cameras, recorders, management systems and network components together into a single system is too challenging and that it’s easier to buy a complete solution that offers them a measure of plug and play. And isn’t there something counterintuitive in the need to be open, yet survive in a competitive market?

A: The whole idea of us starting ONVIF was to bring networked solutions to the same level as analogue systems used to be – to standardize the fundamentals.

So one of the factors when Axis and Bosch first started ONVIF was to break out of that because the analogue CCTV industry was not proprietary – things ran on coaxial cable and it was possible to interchange devices easily.

There certainly is a financial interest

40 se&n

The whole idea of us starting ONVIF was to bring networked solution to the same level as analogue systems used to be – to standardize the fundamentals. for manufacturers to keep things proprietary because if you can keep it proprietary you keep the customer and the income but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.

VMS is an excellent example of this.

Only a few years ago one of the strengths of companies like Genetec, ONSSI and Milestone was that their VMS solutions supported 200 manufacturers. But consider that each manufacturer might have a range of up to 50 cameras with 10-20 upgrades and new releases every year. We are talking about 15-20,000 drivers VMS manufacturers have to maintain on a yearly basis. And the manufacturers have to finance that from the sales of their software. Does all this effort actually drive forward innovation in the industry? Not really.

Instead, by agreeing on ONVIF as a base standard, you free up a lot of resources. Some VMS manufacturers have played this very intelligently – they’ve developed test software for their ONVIF performance and given this to camera manufacturers and say, once you’ve passed this test, your camera works on our software – so driver management can be outsourced to the camera manufacturer.

For end users, it eliminates the

possibility of being locked into a product – government in particular hates lock-ins with proprietary solutions. With ONVIF’s current profiles you can cover 70-80 per cent of the base project and the rest is up to the market to pick what they find to be the best product. Consultants will often pick 5-6 ONVIF compliant manufacturers and say to the buyers – these are all quite similar in terms of their base foundation, so I think it works fine in that way. I think you will always find resistance from those companies which want to promote proprietary systems.

Q: ONVIF has now turned its attention to access control – tell us about that.

A: About 24 months ago we started looking at access control – to deliver product based on the ONVIF profile concept. We deliver specifications to the market – and we already have a profile for access control – Profile C for access control but it’s still quite rudimentary – door status and a few other features like that. It’s really about shaping access control devices so that VMS solutions can pick up their status for integration.

Now we have a more complex profile called Profile A for advanced access control, which has gone through a development phase and is now in a revision phase that will be more comprehensive and allow the building of more complete systems. Profile A is designed to establish an interface for access control clients and expands the configuration options for ONVIFconformant access control systems.

Profile A is available in release candidate status on the ONVIF website.

When you look at the member list of ONVIF you can see some of the big names of the access control industry – so you can see it has certainly generated plenty of interest for major access control players.

Q: There certainly seems to be a clear move from the old serial access control infrastructure to less organic IP solutions. Integrators and system designers seem to be very ready to make the switch to the structure and flexibility of digital infrastructure and manufacturers are heading there, too.

T H E I N T E RV I EW

PE R BJ O R K DA H L W I TH JOHN ADAMS

Certainly, cloud storage is more secure than anything you carry – and you can’t break into a data centre and steal a hard drive the way you can break into a house.

A: There is an evolution towards IP in access control. Access control has been more driven by proprietary technology and that may be justified in the sense that it meant improved security – guarding the door is an important thing.

Access control is a slow moving market but manufacturers are making huge investments in digital and Profile A is designed to provide structure to their developments.

Q: Going back to CCTV and in a broad sense, what do you see as the key challenges facing the video surveillance market over the next 5 years?

A: One of the concerns I have is the very rapid development of high resolution formats. We are going from 1080p, to 4K and perhaps, to 8K. This has a huge impact on infrastructure and storage and the user industry might not understand this. When do they realise if you want to do 8K it’s going to cost a lot of money to build the infrastructure and store that footage? So I think that is a difficulty. I also think the internet of things is going to be a challenge.

Q: Where do you see opportunities in the market over the next 5 years? Do you see areas of growth, are earlier lower resolution IP cameras now needing to be upgraded?

A: We’re seeing opportunities in the transport sector – buses, trains and airports, sea ports. Smart city development incorporating public surveillance is another area of growth.

This applies to developed nations as well as developing nations like India and China where super cities are being

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designed and built. Obviously, in some developed markets investment has slowed, so that’s something that has to be negotiated as well. No region is having runaway growth at the moment. I still don’t think we are at 50-50 IP vs analogue and I don’t think any industries have a replacement policy when it comes to CCTV cameras. Users gradually replace them over an extended period of time.

Q: Cloud. Do you see that as being a real thing?

A: Yes, it’s definitely a real thing. I don’t think it will revolutionise the industry overnight, but it will gradually go to cloud as a process taking place in networking. There is some uncertainty in the electronic security industry about cloud – the continuity of the connection and security of the data on the cloud.

But the market is going there and some companies have many thousands of video channels that are connected to the cloud. So it’s happening but at a steady pace. Certainly, cloud storage is more secure than anything you carry – and you can’t break into a data centre and steal a hard drive the way you can break into a house.

Q: When it comes to the future, do you have a sense of what the surveillance industry will look like – will it continue towards being diffuse as it is now, with surveillance used for anything from animal husbandry to remote education, traffic and process control and smart cities.

A: If you consider CCTV as being surveillance cameras rather than security cameras, then the industry is whatever surveillance needs to be, including security surveillance. There are no limits to the things that need to be monitored.

Q: Do you think the IoT is real?

A: It’s real – IoT is something that has existed for about 10 years without being named. It’s happening in the security industry. Devices are getting smarter, they are being networked, there’s a need from the industry and there’s aspiration for manufacturers to meet these changes in the market. What the security industry

provides users is peace of mind and if that peace of mind is unsettled by the worry that someone maybe be able to access a device – I think that’s the challenge of the IoT. The security industry needs to be conservative when it comes to IoT. There should be technical standards relating to communications paths carrying security devices – this is a dialogue the security industry needs to have. It’s not just the technical aspects we should think about – the social aspects relating to hacking need to be taken into account as well. Mobile devices are becoming bridges into systems – things like that now have to be taken into account. We need to be cautious – integrity of system communications is becoming more and more important.

Q: What about higher resolutions like 4K? These seem to me to offer great resolution – to work well with wider angle lenses, allowing digital zooming. When combined with compression methods like Zipstream that might bring bitrate down to 5Mbps, could 4K be a sweet spot, do you think?

A: It’s likely that at a bitrate of 5Mbps detail will be compromised with a 4K camera. You also have to look at scenarios – for a stadium it might be perfect. On a street you will get large parts of the scene that will not be of interest, though Zipstream would have benefits in an application like this. There would be a certain number of camera views in a system that would benefit from 4K – areas where the entire field of view will be of interest. 4K also means you can install fewer cameras and that is a real benefit.

There are other technologies that are valuable. If cameras don’t need artificial light you can save energy, if you can use fewer cameras you save energy, if you can reduce storage you save energy. If you want your site to be green building certified then you need to pin down the energy consumption of systems that are operating 24-7. It’s not only about high resolution but having a smaller environmental footprint. Recycling plastics, using recyclable packaging. zzz

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N EWS RE P O RT FACIAL RECOGNITION

FACE RECOGNITION The first study to test the skills of FBI agents and other law enforcers who have been trained in facial recognition has provided a reassuring result – they perform better than the average person or even computers on this difficult task.

R

ESEARCH also suggests that trained facial forensic examiners identify faces in a different way to the small number of people who are naturally very good at face matching – the so-called super-recognisers.

“Super-recognisers tested in previous studies appear to rely on automatic, holistic processes when they compare facial images, but forensic examiners use analytical methods,” says research leader UNSW Australia psychologist Dr David White.

Because of increased use of CCTV, images captured on mobile phones and automatic face

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recognition technology, the comparison of facial images to identify suspects has become an important source of evidence.

“These identifications affect the course and outcome of criminal investigations and convictions.

But despite calls for research on any human error in forensic proceedings, the performance of the experts carrying out the face matching had not previously been examined,” says Dr White.

“The examiners’ superiority was greatest when they had a longer time to study the images, and they were also more accurate than others at matching faces when the faces were shown upside down. This is consistent with them tuning into the finer details in an image, rather than relying on the whole face.”

The study, which included colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Texas at Dallas in the US, is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. For the study, the researchers tested an international group of 27 facial forensic examiners with many years of experience who were attending a meeting of the Facial identification Scientific Work Group. The group’s member agencies include the FBI, and police and customs and border protection services in the US, Australia and other countries.

The trained experts were given 3 tests where they had to decide if pairs of images were of the same person. Their performance was compared to that of a control group of non-experts who were attending the same meeting, as well as a group of untrained students.

The pairs of images used were selected to be particularly challenging, reflected in the fact that computer algorithms were 100 per cent wrong on one of the tests. For some of the tests participants were given 2 seconds, or 30 seconds, to decide.

“Overall, our study is good news. It provides the first evidence that these professional examiners are experts at their work. They were consistently more accurate on all tasks than the controls and the students,” says Dr White.

“However, it is important to note that although the tests were challenging, the images were relatively good quality. Faces were captured on high-resolution cameras, in favourable lighting conditions and subjects were looking straight at the camera.

“This is often not the case when images are extracted from surveillance footage,” says Dr White.

While the study did not look at this area directly, its findings support the notion that experienced operators in CCTV control rooms make a significant contribution to recognition of offenders they already know. In many public CCTV applications operators become familiar with local people and this local knowledge contributes significantly to their ability to assist police investigations. zzz

P RO D U CT REV I EW

2GIG GO!CONTROL

GO!CONTROL 2GIG Go!Control, distributed locally by QSS, is America’s biggest selling alarm and automation panel, so it’s no surprise I was keen to get a look at this system.

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T

HROUGH the power and flexibility of 2GIG Go!Control panel Vivint became a giant, with 7000 employees, around one million customers and a turnover of more than half a billion dollars a year, and growing quarter by quarter. 2GIG Go!Control was also the hardware portal through which Alarm.com went from being a provider of services to monitoring stations to a household name.

Given its impact on the North American market, when QSS’ Rob Lucas offered to walk me through the panel, I jumped at the opportunity. In terms of the basics, Go!Control is an integrated controller with a colour touch screen display that can be

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P RO D U CT REV I EW

2GIG GO!CONTROL

controller can be hung on the wall while you are working on it.

“The controller also has an input and an output board so you can have 2 hardwired zones and connect a siren,” explains Lucas, as we rummage through the boxes. “And here’s the little side compartment where you can put in your GSM antenna. There’s a 3G comms module that you use to connect to alarm.com (Vodafone global) – it links to this bridge – and there’s also POTS line communicator if you don’t want to use 3G.” As soon as we power the system up, the panel announces “System disarmed, ready to arm”. This voice prompting is a feature of Go!Control. While Go!Control can be used with Alarm.com it’s also perfectly capable of being used in a more traditional way and linking to monitoring station receivers via PSTN/POTS or 3G linked. Using it as an ordinary panel, Go!Control offers 48 security zones, as well as the potential for 232 Z-wave devices. That big Z-wave capacity means the system has expands considerably, should you want it to. When it comes to Z-wave, 2 devices or a controller and a device typically have a 90m range between them and every 240V switch is a repeater.

“The Go!Control system interface is divided into 2 sides with security and services on one side and automation on the other, which makes things easier to manage,” explains Lucas. “And something else that’s neat is the ability to upgrade the physical capabilities of the systems with firmware updates.

For instance, the software on this 48-zone unit is version 1.3 but with version 1.4 you get 64 zones.

What this means is that to get a hardware upgrade you don’t have to replace a panel. It’s a firmware upgrade via Alarm.com or a direct cable.”

Next we poke round in the menu. It’s straightforward stuff and as intuitive as a modestsized touchscreen can be. The menu allows all the typical functions, including arming and disarming, as well as an installer’s toolbox, which can be tweaked with slider or touch adjustments. There’s everything you’d expect – user management, while system history is stored on the unit, system test, bypasses.

Next, we take a look at services – this is the Z-wave component. Once again this is easy to do. Once you are inside installer programming, you go to system configuration and programming from here is staged as a cascade of questions – how you answer them

wall-mounted or located on desk stand. It offers 48 wireless zones, 2 wired zones and the potential for 232 Z-wave automation devices via an integrated Z-wave radio. The panel supports 8 wireless key fobs, 4 remote wireless keypads, 32 user codes, downloading of firmware upgrades down wireless comms paths and voice response.

The panel has a snap-in GSM radio, remote control of panel settings, 2-way voice-overcellular, customer-messaging capability, weather information display, 24 or 48-hour backup battery (2000 mA @ 7.2V Ni-MH battery pack is included and 2400 mAH @ 7.2 Ni-MH battery pack is optional) and quick arm on exit.

THE UNBOXING CEREMONY Digging the hardware out of the box, the first impression is the integrated controller with touchscreen. Getting access to the controller to install the battery is a simple process - there’s a single grub screw at the back to undo to get the controller housing open. The unit has a desk mount as well, so you don’t have to use the back plate and install it on a wall.

There’s also a neat ‘third hand’ loop , so the

48 se&n

Rob Lucas

The Go!Control system is divided into 2 sides with security and services on one side and automation on the other, which makes things easier to manage,

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P RO D U CT REV I EW defines the nature of system setup. You put in the zone number then use shift and arrow keys to add sensor names, which are programmed by code from a key of options.

Setting up any alarm panel is harder than it looks – it’s the designation of zone details using keypads with basic alphanumeric codepads that’s a fiddle.

Comparatively, Go!Control is much simpler than traditional panels – the system requests responses and you select the response that suits the application – pretty simple stuff.

Next, we power up a PIR and link it to the panel.

First comes adding the battery and then you enter the serial number or place the panel into learning mode. The panel sends a signal through and finds

The system does not care what sort of device the power point Z-wave switch is powering – that’s something that you add in during setup.

Frankly, I’m surprised by how easy this part of the process is.

50 se&n

2GIG GO!CONTROL the sensor, displays the serial number on the screen for verification and you can then make a voice description. You can also select a 3-number code which represents say, Front Bedroom, or Kitchen, or Back Door, etc, and once the zone is set up, details are displayed for you or any other technicians who access Toolbox.

Adding additional zones is just a repeat of this process. You simply press Edit Next, note that Zone 2 is available, and in our case, we link a reed switch.

We power it up, the panel finds the signal from the device, displays the serial number for clarification and we designate the zone description and on it goes.

After we’ve linked a couple of zones, we go into the services area and set up a Z-wave switch that I have plugged into a convenient power socket. This process is even easier than setting up a zone. The system does not care what sort of device the power point Z-wave switch is powering – that’s something that you add in during setup. Frankly, I’m surprised by how easy this part of the process is.

The simplicity of programming Go!Control locally makes it a very simple business to set up security and automation for use as a traditional solution with considerable additional power. And if users want to go to the next level, Alarm.com’s app and all the features surrounding it are readily available. zzz

N EWS RE P O RT CSD INNER RANGE

BY JOHN ADAM S

CSD INNER RANGE SALES NEAR $A100M INNER Range and Central Security Distribution have doubled branch sizes on the East Coast, expanded into ACT and plan to move CSD’s WA branch, with sales for the group’s Australian operations on track to exceed $A100 million this financial year.

F

INANCIAL performance clearly positions the CSD Inner Range group as one of the 2 largest players in the Australian security industry, and arguably the most powerful, thanks to its leading position in innovation, manufacturing and distribution.

According to Vin Lopes of Inner Range CSD group, 2 years of meteoric growth have fuelled the need to expand every part of the organisation to meet surging demand. As staff numbers have shot past 190, Lopes says offices across both Inner Range and CSD have been bulging at the seams.

“This is something that’s going on all along the east coast,” Lopes explains. “In Qld we expanded into the building next door, while in NSW we’ve moved all our admin people out of the branch and into a separate office to make more room. We’ve also opened an office in Canberra and on the West Coast we are looking to expand.

According to Lopes, part of the challenge for the group can be sheeted home to the underlying philosophy of the business. Inner Range is Australia’s leading electronic security engineering house and both Inner Range and CSD, which is the distribution side of the business, have a fierce commitment to ongoing research and development, tech support, training and stock. All these aspects of any business require staff and space.

“As we’ve been growing we’ve continued investing in tech support, we’ve enlarged our training rooms and added remote training capabilities, and we’ve expanded our engineering capacity to support integrators and their customers, as well as all our agencies. We’re also committed to carrying considerable stock – about $A20 million in stock is on group books right now,” Lopes explains. “The result of all these factors is that staff numbers and the demand for space are going through the roof.”

In explaining the group’s success, Lopes cites a combination of factors, including quality staff and quality product, as well as being in the right place at the right time.

“We’ve been fortunate in many ways but it’s one

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thing to get opportunities and another to make a business work at a time of enormous growth – growth is hugely expensive,” he explains. “Partly, our success comes down to feet on the ground and the capacity to manage a growing business, but it’s also the culture of our business.”

According to Mark Cunnington, there are a number of key reasons the CSD Inner Range group has been so successful.

“As the rest of the industry seems to be moving to centralised stocking and sales functions, we remain 100 per cent committed to high levels of local stock holding, as well as highly trained technical support and technical sales staff in all our branches,” Cunnington explains.

“In terms of product range we are specialists not a supermarket. We have a strategic group of carefully selected complimentary brands in each of our categories and we ensure our sales staff are highly trained and backed up by a competent team of product specialists.”

Perhaps most notable is that Inner Range established CSD in 2008, just as the global economic downturn took hold. The challenges of the past 7 years provide much needed contrast to the group’s success – to be closing in on a turnover of $A100 million just 8 years after CSD opened its doors as a distributor of Inner Range and a small number of product lines, is simply amazing.

“We are certainly doing well in turbulent times,” says Lopes. “We have strong agencies, excellent staff – our people and our infrastructure are good enough that we’ve been able to manage extreme growth.

The last couple of years have been really big for us – we are moving rapidly and we have some very big projects in the pipeline with government and commercial organisations. We’ve been waiting for growth to stabilise but there’s so much interest in our solutions at the moment we simply don’t know how far the trend will take us. That said, however, with stunning growth, a healthy bottom line, and almost zero borrowings, we do know we have a lot to be grateful for right now.” zzz

P RO D U CT REV I EW

BEAM ME UP

In many applications there’s nothing better than pushing an electronic security solution out of buildings towards the perimeter.

And the most affordable way to do this is by wiring quality perimeter detection devices directly into intrusion detection systems.

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PXB-1 00ATC

I

F there’s a flaw to modern electronic security solutions it’s that alarm events take place after physical defences have been breached.

In some applications VMD or thermal cameras might be used to project defence in depth but such installations are rare. Generally, the first line of defence in a modern security system is a PIR in a foyer area – many typical commercial applications no longer include reed switches on front doors and glass break sensors too, are the exception rather than the rule.

The challenge here is that by the time the monitoring station is able to report an intrusion event to the keyholder, many minutes may have passed with intruders onsite. Whether the keyholder attends the site themselves or a patrol responds, the delay is going to be significant.

Depending on the time of day, response across the metropolitan area of a major city can take up to an hour, sometimes much more. During the day, it depends on traffic conditions, while after midnight, patrol teams are going to be thin on the ground.

Given these fundamentals, the idea of pushing detection devices outside buildings becomes extremely appealing. Even if a site is not completely surrounded by fences, there are going to be vulnerable areas or key approaches that can be secured, with alarm events not only reported to monitoring stations but driving PTZ presets and/ or sending video alerts to control room operators and/or site management.

But there are challenges to electronic perimeter security applications. Some solutions require a fenceline, some demand trenching, others need considerable real estate to ensure signals do not spill into areas outside the detection zone, generating false alarms. The ideal solution for most applications is a device that has a very narrow detection envelope, that’s capable of covering modest or large areas of open ground, that is highly dependable in a range of conditions and that is extremely affordable in terms of coverage per metre.

Of all the external detection solutions available today, the most flexible and affordable are photoelectric beams, such as the IP65-rated PXB100ATC Dual Output Quad/Anti-Crawl Beam from Takex. This unit offers up to 100m of detection in a compact form factor with transmitter and receiver weighing around 1.5kg. Other features include ±20-degree vertical adjustment, and anti-mask and anti-cloak alignment aids. Also important, it’s possible to stack the beams to a height of 8 metres, created a wall of detection. And given its detection range, current draw is miniscule, with each receiver consuming 48mA and each transmitter consuming only 27mA. Important for ease of integrating with common intrusion detection solutions, the dry contact alarm output is N/C or N/O selectable, while important

for local conditions, ambient temperature range is -35C to 66C. The IP65 rating means housings are totally protected from the ingress of dust, as well as waterproof against low pressure water jets from any direction. Same as all TAKEX photoelectric beams, the PXB-100ATC is designed with in-built waterproof and breathable fabric membrane ventilation and accessories for heating that together eliminate condensation. Specially designed, cable-hugging insect bushings ensure that the sensors remain dry and bug free.

Another key feature of the PXB-100ATC is a double-modulated infrared signal with phaselock loop circuitry in the receiver, which ensures the detector in untroubled by direct sunlight.

Environmental monitoring features can be employed to generate pre-alarm warnings that vegetation is growing into the detection field. The PXB-100ATC incorporates anti-masking and anticloaking as intrinsic aspects of its nature. It is not possible to defeat the system using masking or cloaking methods anywhere in the 100m detection area. Mask the IR signal in the detection zone and your action will always be registered as an alarm.

The PXB-100ATC is supplied with convenient and easy to use alignment aids. Vivid colour coded internal casings allow for easier visual alignment over long distances, and the integrated sound check tone generator and monitor output allow the installer to measure the signal strength using a standard voltage tester. For the most accurate and simple calibration, the optional ER-02 is available as a specialist wireless calibration tool.

ANTI-CRAWL CAPABILITY

Of all the external detection solutions available today, the most flexible and affordable are photoelectric beams, such as the IP65rated PXB100ATC Dual Output Quad/ Anti-Crawl Beam from Takex.

A key aspect of the PXB-100ATC is the nature of the anti-crawl beams, which are supported by time division of half a second, as well as an upper and a lower signal, which are designated AND and OR. The AND and OR signals have separate outputs.

The idea of this is that because it’s impossible for a human to crawl through a beam in half a second, the beams offer high resolution discrimination between human intrusions and the passage of wildlife like birds and small animals.

An OR response is initiated when an opaque/ solid object of 216mm in height passes through the detection area at ground level and either the lower or upper beams are broken. When an OR detection occurs, beam interruption time is determined by the settings applied during calibration. The adjustable response times for OR detection are 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 & 0.5 seconds.

It’s these 4 configurable OR detection response times ensure that small animals such as birds and rats can pass through the detection area undetected, but attempts by humans to crawl through a portion of the detection area are always detected and reported to the alarm controller.

Simultaneously, the AND response is initiated se&n 55

The modular design of the PXB-100ATC sensors ensures that systems can be implemented based on the needs of the application and environment. Sensors can be integrated in a ‘tower’ configuration to create a high security detection zone of 100m outdoors, to a height of over 8m.

Centre of Beam Unit

IntelligentP ROdual response system D U CT REV I EW

0m outdoor / 200m indoor

PXB-1 00ATC

Ground Level

The PXB-100ATC uses a sophisticated dual response and output system that has been designed to distinguish and allocate specific alarm

responses based on the size and speed of target objects moving through the detection area. s can be implemented based on the needs of the application and another bank of 4 sets above that and then Interrupt the upper beam or Interrupt the upper and lower beams ation to create a high security detection zone of 100m lower beam for alarm simultaneously forone alarm more above those – we can go to 16 units high – which is about 8m and more than enough for any conceivable application.”

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE RANGE

TAKEX has a comprehensive range of PE beams allowing installers to select those whose specifications and cost best suit an application. hrough the detection area.

Something that’s neat about TAKEX beams is that range is selectable for a given feature set.

Interrupt the upper and lower beams OR Gatesimultaneously - AT AND Gate - HF for alarm For instance, the single channel PB-30TK, 60TK, The ‘OR’ response is initiated when an opaque object of 216mm in height The ‘AND’ response is initiated when an opaque object of 513mm in height and 100TK Series Twin Beam sensors offer up to passes through the detection area at ground level and either the lower or passes through the detection area at ground level and both lower and 30m, 60 and 100m of outdoor coverage, while the upper beams are broken. When an ‘OR’ detection occurs, beam upper beams are broken simultaneously.

When 40TE, an ‘AND’ detection 4-channel PB-20TE, and 60TE SERIES Twin interruption time is determined by the settings applied during calibration. occurs, beam interruption time reduces to to 0.05 seconds ensuring that large Beams offer up 20m, 40m and 60m of outdoor The adjustable response times for ‘OR’ detection are 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 & 0.5 objects cannot pass through the detection area undetected. During an performance. seconds. The four configurable ‘OR’ detection response times ensure that ‘AND’ alarm condition, both thesingle AT & HF channel output arePB-50F, engaged100F, to The 200F Quad small animals such as birds and rats can pass through the detection area communicate a full alarm.

The unique size and speed processing reduces Beams give up to 50m, 100m and 200m of outdoor undetected, but attempts by humans to crawl through a portion of the the likelihood of nuisance alarms caused birds or debris PB-IN-50HF, 100HF coverage, whilebythe 4-channel detection flying through the detection whileQuad maximizing the give 50m, 100m and and area, 200HF Beams AND Gatearea - HF are always detected and reported to the alarm controller. when an opaque object of 513mm in height passes catch performance of legitimate targets.

200m of outdoor coverage.

The ‘AND’ response is initiated when an opaque object of 513mm in height through the detection area at ground level and both Designed for use in TA Series Beam Towers, the passes through the detection area at ground level and both lower and The combination the HFbeams (AND)are & AT (OR) outputs allows for unsurpassed performance and event reporting lower andofupper broken simultaneously.

4-channel PB-50HF-KH, 100HF-KH and 200HF-KH upper beams are broken simultaneously. When an ‘AND’ detection When an AND detection occurs, beamallows interruption capabilities.

TAKEX’s unique processing system control equipment to respond appropriately to prone crawling Quad Beams give upand to 50m, 100m and 200m of occurs, beam interruption time reduces to 0.05 seconds ensuring that large time reduces to 0.05 seconds ensuring that large outdoor performance, while the 4-channel PXBgeneral perimeter breaches. objects cannot pass through the detection area undetected. During an objects like humans cannot pass through the 50HF, 100HF and 200HF Quad Beams deliver up to ‘AND’ alarm condition,area bothundetected the AT & HF output engaged detection whileare running or to diving.

50m, 100m and 200m outdoors. communicateDuring a full alarm.

The unique and speedboth processing reduces an AND alarmsize condition, the AT & Anti-Crawl Beams include the 4-channel PB±20 degree vertical adjustment the likelihood nuisance alarmstocaused by birds oradebris HFof output engage communicate full alarm. The IN-100AT, with up to 100m range outdoors, the flying through detection while maximizing sizethe and speedarea, processing reducesthe the likelihood 4-channel PB-100AT-KH with up to 100m outdoor, catch performance of legitimate targets. of nuisance alarms caused20by birds or debris flying which is designed for use in TA Series beam towers. degree change in elevation equivalent to the height of 8 stacked decker buses over 100m through the detection area, whiledouble maximizing the There’s also the 4-channel PXB-100ATC-KH Dual ed performance and event reporting catch performance of legitimate targets, like diving Output Quad/Anti-Crawl Beam, which offers a to respond intruders. appropriately to prone crawling and range of up to 100m outdoors, and is designed for use in TA Series beam towers.

STACKABLE BEAMS Other beam options include the 4-channel PXB20 degrees According to Tom Kinkade, national sales manager, 100m Protection Distance 100SW Low Current Beam, which gives up to 100m Takex Australia, one of the issues with all PE beams of outdoor performance, the PR-5B Reflector Beam, over the years is that there have been limits on how which gives up to 5m indoors, the PR-11B Reflector high they could be stacked. www.takex.com/au Beam, which offers up to 11m outdoors and 15m “In the past it’s always been dangerous to transmit indoor and the 4-channel TXF-125E battery neighbouring channels in the same direction operated Quad Beam, which if IP65-rated and gives or channels of the same frequency because of up to 100m of coverage outdoors, as well as a 5-year crosstalk,” he explains. battery life. zzz “Traditionally they’d be installed transmitter, receiver, transmitter, receiver and you were limited n Distance to about 4 high and could not have linear zones because channel 1 over here might hit channel 1 over there.

“The PXB-100ATC series of beams with their l2 0 degree vertical / 90 degree l Independent control of upper and advanced synchronized timing system have a horizontal adjustment lower beams couple of benefits,” Kinkade explains. “First, they lV ivid colour coded internal casings l Choose between Synchro Quad and are synchronised by a time division system. In the for easy visual alignment Anti-Crawl operation past units 1 and 3 might have gone in one direction l Integrated sound check tone l Separate outputs for crawl attempt generator and monitor output and full beam break and units 3 and 4 might have gone in the other. l Advanced synchronization - stack l Ambient temp range between -35C “Now the top units are channel 1A and channel more TAKEX sensors than ever before to 66C 1B – on same frequency – and with the other units l IP65 housing. l Transmitter and receiver each weight it’s the same. So we have a bank of 4 sets and we around 1.5kg are able to have another bank of 4 sets above it that has been designed to distinguish and allocate specific alarm

Features of the PXB-100ATC include:

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ALARM M ONI TORI NG / SEGM ENT

1

Proudly brought to you by

BY JOHN ADAM S Your Monitoring Specialists

1300 130 515

www.bensecurity.com.au

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD The global industrial internet of things is coming, driven by demographics, as well as by the pursuit of new revenue streams. Is the electronic security industry ready? Surprisingly so, and may benefit in multiple ways.

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W

HEN it comes to phrases of jargon, there’s nothing quite so popular in the technology sector right now as the internet of things.

The nature of this ecosystem, its topology and any functional form of user interface remains nebulous. Even its acronym is annoying.

But regardless of the things that are unexplained about the nature of the IoT, it is growing and will increase in size at a 26.5 per cent compound rate through until 2019, according to Infiniti Research.

Interestingly, the report segments the IoT market into 4 end-user segments including manufacturing, energy and

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utilities, automotive and transportation, and health care.

What’s driving growth are the demand to leverage generated data that might enhance customer feedback, reduce costs, improve services and increase revenue.

There’s also a push towards a different sort of workforce, with more automation and an increase in the number of smart devices. Infiniti also says countries have realized that sensor data could help avoid catastrophic failures in key infrastructure networks like water, power and transport.

It might seem like a stretch but in Australia a number of city and regional councils are seeking to add analytics to public surveillance systems that will improve their ability to respond to events across larger systems or systems that are not monitored in real time. There’s talk of gunshot sensors and an expansion of IVA that will make systems fundamentally intelligent.

And in multiple applications we see local and enterprise solutions that combine alarms, access control, air conditioning, lighting, video surveillance and many sensors in a single integrated workstation. Genetec’s latest version of Security Center springs immediately to mind and it’s hard not to think of the capabilities of Bold Manitou when considering such broad applications.

A fundamental that makes the electronic security industry so ripe for IoT is that its core nature is identical to that of IoT. In electronic security systems, networks of intrusion and door sensors pass data to controllers where it is accessed by remote workstations or gathered by servers and collated on workstations for actioning, management and reporting. If you add CCTV cameras, flood sensors, smoke sensors, carbon monoxide sensors, vibration sensors, medical alerts, etc, to the mix, you can see that a fully expanded security solution is a micro (local) or macro (enterprise) expression of IoT. What are the enablers that might take electronic security solutions to the next level? Infrastructure capable of supporting ubiquitous cloud is the first thing. An expanded concept of IoT involves the sensors and controllers and servers/workstations or multiple systems working together as part of cloud-based

60 se&n

To my mind, what’s great about the concept of IoT for the evolution of electronic security solutions is the concept itself. applications. Would multiple end users share sensor data within the constraints of security monitoring facilities? They might.

It is challenging for enough alarm and automation panel manufacturers who bring together groups of sensors into an app so trying to wrangle vast amounts of sensor data from multiple locations in a meaningful way is going to be seriously tough. Some people will be willing to share data gathered by their sensors, while others will not be so eager. But in many ways, that’s a moot point.

To my mind, what’s great about the concept of IoT for the evolution of electronic security solutions is the concept itself. In many ways companies like Honeywell, DSC, Ness, Risco, 2GIG and others already facilitate micro IoTs in every location in which they are installed.

But despite the capability of existing technology, really clever and highly integrated solutions are rarely to be seen.

If the concept of IoT becomes clearer in the minds of domestic and commercial users there will be considerable advantages for the electronic security industry and the monitoring companies

that support them. As things stand, the monitoring sector needs to strengthen the case for 24-hour alarm monitoring.

With expanded systems, the ability to monitor internal and external detection zones, door sensors, smoke sensors, flood sensors, temperature sensors, carbon monoxide sensors, VMD events and medical alerts 24 hours a day would be a great strength.

The trouble is, only a very small number of systems are installed with these sorts of detection capabilities. Sad to say, most modern alarm systems have a small number of fairly basic PIRs – they might be dual pyro if you’re lucky - and it’s at this basic level of detection that DIY systems and bundled telco solutions are going to be able to compete.

To my mind, the greatest challenges of the global IoT are going to be accessing data from multiple users and then presenting it in a form that is coherent and useful. But that does not mean the general concept of IoT is not a place the electronic security should be very ready to promote. At a fundamental level, electronic security systems arrived at this future decades ago. zzz

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P RO D U CT REV I EW

DAHUA IP C- HFW4 800EP 4 K

DAHUA IPCHFW4800EP 4K

Dahua’s Dahua IPCHFW4800EP 4K bullet camera proves good things do come in small packages.

We like 4K at SEN and this PoE IP66-rated bullet, with its 4mm lens and IR support, proved to be a super little camera.

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I

F I hadn’t got a sneak preview of Dahua’s 4K box camera before doing this review, I might have argued the IPC-HFW4800EP was the best camera in Dahua’s range for daylight performance. In terms of colour rendition, sharpness, acuity, lack of distortion, lack of CAs, lack of noise, lack of rebuild artefacts, it’s a very wellbalanced camera.

Let’s take a look at some specifications before we get into performance. The 4800EP has a maximum main stream frame rate of 15fps @ 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels), it’s 25/30 at 1080P, and the bitrate for H.264 streams is adjustable from 20K~16Mbps.

I tend to think that 15ips means movement is not seamless but plenty of end users favour this frame rate.

After spending an afternoon with the camera I found that

BY JOHN ADAM S

Norman at 8m

Norman at 12m

Norman at 20m

for typical applications like face recognition and number plate recognition, 15ips was fine.

The form factor of the 4800EP is a bullet with a poly sunshade. The camera is PoE, IP66-rated, features a ½.3inch progressive scan CMOS and offers H.264/MJPEG and dual-stream encoding. There’s also 30m IR range from integrated IR LEDs. Other camera features include Day/ Night, Auto ICR, backlight compensation, digital WDR, auto or manual white balance and gain control. There’s Dahua’s 3D noise reduction, privacy masking of up to 4 areas, electronic shutter speed is auto or manual and can be set between 1/3(4)~1/10000s. Minimum scene illumination is claimed to be 0.1 Lux/F1.6 in colour and 0 Lux at F1.6 in monochrome with IR on. Signal to noise

Sun on Norman’s face

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ratio is good at more than 50dB. The manual focus f1.6 lens is fixed at 4mm giving an 80-degree angle of view. A fixed lens might be seen as a weakness in a camera that did not have this much resolution and there may be some applications where the shorter or longer focal length potentials of a varifocal lens might be preferable. But the simplicity of the element equation of this fixed 4mm lens goes some way to explaining why it has such fine performance. Covered by a clear window, the lens proper has a red Magnesium Fluoride coating targeting the 550nm centre of the visible spectrum to provide resistance to flare and ghosting.

Power consumption is 7.5W, operating temperature is solid at -30 to 60C, dimensions are compact at

DAHUA IP C- HFW4 800EP 4 K

When I take the camera out front of the office and point it up the street, what’s most noticeable is the high level of detail even at this comparatively wide 4mm focal length. If this was a 1080p camera there’s no chance I’d leave it at 4mm out here but spreading pixels is not an issue. just 178.4mm x 70mm x 69.9mm, while weight is 528 grams. This is a small camera but it feels extremely well made in the hand, thanks to its metal body and mounting bracket. There’s integrated RJ-45 and power leads emerging from the bracket. Everything about the 4800EP seems well stitched together. It’s not a complicated build. There’s only one adjustable external setting on the camera body.

TESTING TIMES

Norman at 8m in about 7 lux

Norman at 18m

Under streetlight at 10m

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The first impressions you get with this camera are its strong resolution, excellent colour rendition and surprisingly low latency. I start off my test out the back and find that when faced with extreme backlight – and by that I mean with the sun in the frame - the 4800EP compensates by muting colours. This is normal for many high resolution IP cameras. As soon as I push the lens away from the sun, the colours fill in. It’s a quite neutral sensor – not too warm, not too cool.

The other things I notice – especially once I go to full screen – are a comparative lack of barrel distortion and low levels of chromatic aberration. Yes, there is barrel distortion – it’s a 4mm lens after all – but it’s very well controlled. I prefer 4-5mm on the street to extreme wide angles, such as 2.8mm. Without pointing the camera at a test sheet I think distortion is probably 8-9 per cent, which is exceptionally good for a compact bullet camera like this one.

Chromatic aberration is very mild in areas of high contrast – I have to go looking for it. This suggests the simple fixed lens of the 4800EP is focusing all wavelengths in nearly the same plane. Lack of CAs improves contrast and detail and that’s a desirable feature in any camera. I also notice when I’m out the back in very bright sun – 70,000 lux or so – that the camera shows no sign of flare and I see no ghosts at any time, day or night.

When I take the camera out front of the office and point it up the street, what’s most noticeable is the high level of detail even at this comparatively wide 4mm focal length. If this was a 1080p camera there’s no chance I’d leave it at 4mm out here but spreading pixels is not an issue. We’ve said it before and here it is again – 4K is sensational when it comes to detail.

Given appropriate light levels, 1080p cannot compare with it. This little Dahua 4K is better than any 1080p

P RO D U CT REV I EW

camera I’ve tested in terms of its ability to give admissible evidence in daylight hours.

Something else I notice as the afternoon wears away, is that there’s a division between the shaded side of the street and the sunny side. This is a challenging scene in that regard and I have the camera settings at default. Later on, when I take the camera out the back as the sun is sinking further, the scene gets darker than I’d like. At this point I make some adjustments to brightness (60 per cent), contrast (55 per cent) and saturation (55 per cent). All my other settings are default – profile is set to day, day/night is set to auto, 3D NR is on with levels at default.

With my new settings the image in these lower light levels is excellent in the foreground, though I lose the blue of the sky. Whether you’d have a group of settings that were applied after hours is something the installer would need to consider. Dahua’s SmartPSS software certainly allows this. Importantly, the adjustments I make are tiny but the difference they make is enormous – especially going to 60 per cent with brightness. As the sun sinks, the 4800EP and I go through that lovely period of best-seeing for an IP camera – not so much light that the camera starts to over compensate, not so little light the scene gets dark, or suffers amplification noise as ISO winds up. When I break out my Sekonic to check, I measure light levels at around 4000 lux.

At 6.05pm and at 500 lux at the lens, I get up and go look out the back window because even though the days are getting longer again, the little Dahua camera is starting to surprise me. “It’s got IR for a reason, right?”

I catch myself saying. Ten minutes later it’s under 10 lux at the lens and there is now some noise and some smoothing creeping in and robbing detail and I can see blooming around the streetlight which is in the frame. Regardless, for all practical purposes, it’s a bright image and I’m now very interested in what’s going to come next.

At around 6.20pm, the 4800EP flicks over to monochrome and the IR comes on. I measure light at around 5 lux. IR range seems good and in monochrome I lose a lot of the noise that had started to impact on scene quality in colour. In another 10 minutes I’m measuring less than 1 lux at the lens but the image doesn’t alter. For a 4K bullet camera, performance in sub-1 lux in the back lane is good. You

DAHUA IP C- HFW4 800EP 4 K

Back lane at 8000 lux

500 lux

sub-10 lux

In a number of my snapshots I deliberately include cars and pedestrians and the 4800EP has no trouble with blur whatever. I’m able to jag license plates of cars doing at least 60kmph.

Around 5 lux at lens

66 se&n

are not going to get any measure of face recognition deeper than 10m perhaps, but you’ll have situational awareness.

Taking the 4800EP out the front, performance is improved but it’s still typically challenging for a 4K camera in low light, even with IR on. You’re getting situational awareness out to about 12m but beyond this faces and fine details become less distinct, which is typical for a compact camera with integrated IR. There’s also typical IR flare from faces. When I run Norman up and down the street I get good detail of the target and some face recognition closer in, but not further out. I take Norman out to about 18m from the lens but there’s no point going further than this.

Later on, I test the camera inside the office with IR on and again I’m getting perfect situational awareness but I can’t get face recognition. This may relate to Norman’s shiny poly coating - no matter which way I turn Norman, I still get flare. This is typical of an IR array integrated into a camera. You really need an oblique angle to get best performance from IR. Next day, I take Norman out the front and we go through the business of testing performance at 8m, 12m and then about 20m in this busy, variable street scene, with its shadows and harsh sunlight. The IPC-HFW4800EP is seriously impressive out here.

Its high resolution and excellent colour rendition, combined with that neat little 4mm lens make the

4800EP a great street performer.

While we are out here I pay special attention to latency – I judge this to be about 200-300ths of a second, which is very good. There are plenty of 1080p cameras on the market with latencies of well over half a second and some are close to 1 second.

The other thing I take a look at is motion blur – I’m interested because the 15ips frame rate renders fast moving vehicles in steps and viewing a monitor live it’s hard to tell if there’s blur being registered in recorded images. However, I find the little Dahua to

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P RO D U CT REV I EW

DAHUA IP C- HFW4 800EP 4 K

be exceptionally good in this regard. In a number of my snapshots I deliberately include cars and pedestrians and the 4800EP has no trouble with blur whatever. I’m able to jag license plates of cars doing at least 60kmph.

Overall, this is a fine camera. Low light performance is not as strong as daytime performance but the camera’s 30m IR allows useful situational awareness deep into low light scenes. When compared to the performance of IRsupported 1080p compact cameras, the Dahua performs better at night not just close in but in terms of depth of field. During the day, the image from the 4800EP is a revelation. We’ve not tested a compact bullet camera that comes close to it for image quality. zzz 70, 000 lux of backlight

Features of Dahua IPCHFW4800EP include: l 1/2.3-inch 4K progressive scan CMOS l H.264 &MJPEG dual-stream encoding l Max 15fps @ 4K (3840×2160) l DWDR, Day/Night(ICR), 3DNR,AWB,AGC,BLC l Multiple network monitoring: Web viewer, CMS(DSS/ PSS) & DMSS l ONVIF, PSIA, CGI compliant l 4mm fixed lens l 30m IR range l P66-rated housing, PoE.

Good work, Dahua – great WDR performance

68 se&n

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P RO D U CT REV I EW

SCSI DIRECTCONNECT

Ian Farrell

SCSI DIRECTCONNECT NEW from SCSI is A DirectConnect, a fixed-IP 4G service that links CCTV field devices in remote locations; via SCSI’s private and secure network using a standard 4G router and Fixed IP Addressable SIM.

70 se&n

ccording to SCSI’s Ian Farrell, DirectConnect is deployed through a standard 4G router that connects to SCSI’s private and secure network from any location with 4G wireless coverage. Because DirectConnect is a communications device that facilitates connection with existing hardware, the best way to understand it is as part of an application.

“Imagine if onsite you have a camera, connected to an NVR, connected to a switch and through DirectConnect, users can connect to their sites via the web, or Android or iOS devices,” explains Farrell. “You don’t even need a switch – instead you have our 4G Router with SCSI’s DirectConnect SIM card in it connected directly to the NVR or camera. Bandwidth is between 30-50Mbps download and around 15-30Mbps upload depending

BY JOHN ADAM S on where you are in relation to the tower, which is exceptionally fast.

“DirectConnect can be used for live streaming with data rates from 1gig to 300gig, however, it is more typically used for remote viewing when required for video verification. What you’d do it set the system up on motion and then access video remotely to check the event. Real time video, or VMD could be stored on an individual camera with SD card or on a local NVR. The choice is really down to the client.

According to Farrell, one of the strengths of DirectConnect is that the 4G router has a fixed IP address at all times, removing the inconvenience of having to visit a site to reconfigure hardware should the network allocate another IP address to the device as is typically the case.

“And something else that’s great about DirectConnect is that it allows central monitoring stations to easily connect to remote CCTV equipment to carry out video verification on alarms as well as offering virtual guard tours to increase revenue, reducing false callout fees and improving customer service.”

In terms of hardware, the DirectConnect SIM card sits in a 4G router. This could be a low-cost 4G router or something more professional like the Netcom NTC140, which features dual 4G antennas for improved cellular performance, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports and micro USB port.

“We’ve found the Netcom NTC140 to offer great signal strength, smart and intuitive GUI, easy programming and excellent flexibility – it’s outstanding,” says Farrell.

“Typically, the router connects directly to the NVR or individual camera, with traffic routing to the nearest tower and then into SCSI’s virtual private network. This VPN is connected to our servers hosted in our own private network.

“The NVR or camera also connects to the world wide web via a secure VPN connection so a client can log on with an Android phone or an iPhone - you can logon via a management software, such as Hikvision, NuuO, Dahua or Avigilon, and video will be streamed from the remote location directly to your GUI. Alternatively, you can log onto www.directconnect.scsi.com.au and then connect directly to the web portal of the NVR or camera and view live or playback footage as well as remotely configure and diagnose the system on site without the need or cost to send tech’s to the location.

We have seen integrators save on costly call out charges to diagnose problems or faults.”

Farrell says that from the client’s perspective, the process of setting up DirectConnect involves running the Open VPN software and obtaining client certificates from SCSI that give access to its VPN from the web. All of this is achieved online. Once a user is connected, they can view image streams on mobile devices, GUI, web or

pull the feeds into their control room and view them on their video wall alongside other cameras.

“As DirectConnect is an easy deployable solution that only requires a 4G router, it often means IT departments don’t need to be involved,” Farrell says.

“Whether you are looking to remotely monitor a building site with no infrastructure, have a location that doesn’t allow video or security data over their networks, or require a low cost remotely managed network solution, then DirectConnect is your solution.

“For instance, it allows end users like councils to link to remote sites to check on NVRS or DVRs without leaving their desks, saving time and money as well as having an impact on the environment by reducing greenhouse emissions as they no longer need to travel between sites to check equipment. Everything is now at their fingertip and mobile. Council can remotely see issues with a system and action the fault immediately with their system integrators.

“And installers and monitoring stations can now deploy video verification to a range of different sites using an advanced yet simple communication technology that offers superior performance to many ADSL2+ links. It’s simple, it’s quick and it’s easy. You plug the DirectConnect router into your NVR and off you go,” Farrell says. “With video verification you will shortly be able to physically take an output from your alarm panel and connect it as an input into the NVR. When the panel sends an alarm signal to the control room, it will also send an output to the NVR, which communicates via 4G to the control room so there’s associated video pre and post-alarm.”

According to Farrell, DirectConnect is a response to clients, installers and control rooms struggling to obtain a simple, flexible and rapid deployable solution to remote video monitoring or streaming. With the evolving 4G networks providing an ever-increasing bandwidth, range and coverage, DirectConnect can offer an outstanding solution for typically less than the cost of an inferior ADSL connection.

“No matter where your location may be or what infrastructure you have on site, DirectConnect’s high performance and secure 4G link can now provide you with connectivity to remotely monitor your premises or assets,” Farrell says.

“And SCSI DirectConnect will very shortly be able to securely and reliably connect not only CCTV, but access control, BMS, medical alert, in fact any IP device, via SCSI’s VPN. This feature is planned to be released imminently.” zzz

se&n 71

S P E CI AL RE P O RT

CLOUD

VAPOURWARE

Cloud, that vaporous construct of marketers and human imagination, holds many installers, integrators and end users in thrall but they’d feel more relaxed if they simply defined cloud as ‘someone else’s computer’.

P

ART of the challenge of the transition to a networking landscape that includes cloud is market acceptance. For many people, the word cloud and all misty images of condensation meant to represent it, are opaque and incomprehensible. When people explain cloud, they seldom mention data centres. Instead they wave their hands mysteriously as though invoking Be’al, The Life of Everything. The reality, however, is far more pedestrian. When George Favaloro and Sean O’Sullivan came up with the idea of cloud computing in 1996 they not only began Compaq’s push to supply servers to cloud computing providers but heralded a new frontier of networking.

Over at Bosch, James Layton says cloud has a couple of definitions that need to be considered.

“In the simplest form, it encompasses off-site

72 se&n

storage of data (being the storage of data outside of the physical location where the data was created) and off-site processing (being data management or data processing carried out on hardware away from the physical location where the data is generated),” he explains.

“On a more practical note, cloud has also become synonymous with cost aggregation of data storage and processing. Say, I have 1000 users, who all require an equal level of data processing. Under normal circumstances, each user is up for the same hardware costs. But now imagine that at any point in time, only 10 per cent of those users needs to be actively processing data – by using a cloud facility with processing power for only 100 users, but with that processing being shared depending on needs, each user is only up for one tenth the cost. Of course in real applications, cloud

BY JOHN ADAM S

There is actually a very immediate benefit of cloud services today, and that is the fact that it is helping the security industry adapt to IPbased infrastructure.

servers are built to handle higher than the expected load, but there is only a cost saving if the system is built to handle less than the maximum possible load.”

Layton believes cloud will be a significant part of all network topologies in the future.

“Definitely it will be,” he says. “Off-site backup of data has been around in the IT industry for decades, it was usually handled through the physical movement of storage units such as magnetic tapes. With almost every network now connected to the Internet, the ability to shift data to a secure secondary location has become much easier.

“No matter how many backups you do of your system at home, none of that is any good to you if the house itself burns down – off-site storage allows a much greater degree of protection. When it comes

to data processing, many users or businesses can’t afford to build large scale server farms required for processing massive amounts of collected data. Using cloud technology, these people are able to share the processing load to offsite facilities and make use of otherwise unused CPU cycles.”

According to Layton, cloud is already a large part of electronic security, and is going to become an even larger part going forward.

“When you look at conventional security hardware, its primary weakness is the physical hardware itself,” Layton explains. “It’s fine to have a DVR in your business to record an incident, but if the perpetrators are able to locate and disable or destroy the device, the evidence is lost. For this reason, you can certainly see the appeal of having the data remotely stored offsite as it is collected.

“Additionally, as analytics become more and more important to electronic security (including features such as facial recognition, left object detection, etc), the choice will either be to place the analytical engine in the field (ie – at the edge), increasing the cost of the installed hardware, or transferring the analytical intelligence into the cloud where larger and more robust hardware can process the data.”

What are the most important elements of any cloud-based electronic security solution – for instance, adequate layers of infrastructure, the user interface, lack of latency, encryption?

“Cloud services for electronic security need to be a little different than they may be for other IT applications,” Layton says. “Take the example listed above of reducing the cost by only using enough hardware to cover the expected portion of the system required at one time – that’s all well and good until something unforeseen happens and the available load is exceeded.

“In the past, major incidents like earthquakes or mass power outages have caused a large number of alarm panels to report in at once – as a user of security services, you wouldn’t want to think that your data may get lost because the cloud server was too busy processing other requests.

“So, the scale of the infrastructure is a key element – the system needs to be able to maintain a full load.

Additionally, like any system designed to provide redundancy, it needs to be robust. More and more

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data centres are going to pop up in Australia as cloud services become more relevant and choosing the most reliable one is going to become a difficult decision.”

Layton believes that encryption is going to become one of the hardest things to manage with cloud.

“It’s not an issue if a product uses its own proprietary cloud server, but if a manufacturer plans to use one of the larger and more robust providers like Amazon Web Services for its infrastructure, the level of sharing required regarding the encryption of signals is going to be a major consideration,” he says.

“Encryption is about the biggest corporate secret a security company can have – the more entities you have to share it with, the greater the chance it is broken, and is suddenly very unsecure.

“One last consideration is going to be data ownership. Once you put your data into the cloud, you have given someone else a degree of control over it. When you put household items in to a storage facility and then don’t pay your bill – the facility reserves the right to sell the items you stored to recover their costs… could such a thing also be possible with your data?”

What is the greatest challenge for the future of cloud security applications in Australia – is it infrastructure? Is it bandwidth? Is it data security?

Is it the security of mobile devices? Is it establishing a viable business model? Is it cost/economies of scale for the end user? Is it misapprehension in the market? Is it something else?

“The biggest problem facing cloud services in Australia currently is the availability of bandwidth,” Layton argues. “Last year in North America the FCC made a ruling that an ISP had to be able to provide 25Mbps bandwidth to be able to use the term broadband to describe its service. Currently, this is the maximum speed we are expecting to see with the NBN for the foreseeable future.

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“Without considering expensive fibre links, it is simply not practical to expect to be able to store live high definition footage from your IP camera system into the cloud. Video for the moment is limited to snapshots, lower resolution, or delayed clippings of video of relevant events, making it difficult to call the cloud service a truly contemporaneous storage option.

“This isn’t the case for simpler communications such as alarm communications or even home automation control, but at least at the moment, the industry is still finding its feet when it comes to the costs, security and reliability of these services.

Looking abroad, in North America basically anything security on the cloud is going to cost you, whereas in most European countries, a lot of security manufacturers are offering cloud services for little or no charge.”

What do you see as being the greatest strengths of cloud? For instance, storage redundancy, redundancy of power, removal of the need to maintain network hardware and a secure network space on site, reduction in costs to power and cool network hardware, delivery of powerful remote capabilities to simple local security systems, the ability to allow remote management of systems, etc?

“There is actually a very immediate benefit of cloud services today, and that is the fact that it is helping the security industry adapt to IP-based infrastructure,” Layton explains. “Technology has changed over time, and one of the biggest struggles a lot of veteran system integrators are dealing with is learning the basics of layer 3 networking – the need to forward ports for a device to communicate outside its own network. Most cloud-based products now provide port tunnelling services that remove this need and are helping less IP savvy installers keep up with the technology.

“As cloud becomes more commonplace, the initial consumer draw is likely to come from the remote access and control functionalities. These days everyone owns a smartphone, and having the ability to quickly check the cameras to make sure the kids have gotten home from school is going to be the sort of feature that appeals to the end user and gets them across the hurdle of the additional cost of cloud. As global manufacturers push ahead with the internet of things, connectivity, or the perception of it, is going to be a key driver in purchasing decisions.

“Getting deeper into the security side, the true benefit is going to come from the inherent redundancy offered by cloud, along with the enhanced capabilities we should start to see in electronic security systems as manufacturers come to terms with the possibilities of remote data processing.”

Seadan is the largest distributor of Risco alarm panels and detectors in Australia and over the last 18 months the company has embraced cloud as a back end to provide remote access and management of these systems.

According to Risco’s technical manager, Peter O’Callaghan, the concept of cloud combines infrastructure, hardware and user interface.

“In terms of Risco’s cloud, it’s a global network of servers that are interconnected to provide a stable secure platform to allow customers to access their Risco alarm panels from anywhere using their smartphone app, Web UI, or configuration software,” explains O’Callaghan. “The cloud offers the easiest way to install and configure network-based systems, and allows reduction of cost and an increase in reliability.”

Callaghan believes cloud will be a significant part of all network topologies in the future.

“The trend is significantly moving toward cloudbased systems, not only in terms of monitoring intrusion systems, but also CCTV customers are

Most medium to large organizations are incorporating cloud as part of their IT infrastructure strategy and while some of them have already implemented or rolling out cloud computing models.

demanding that the cost of securing their homes and business becomes less and less, as well as taking advantage of the lower maintenance requirement for hardware,” O’Callaghan says.

O’Callaghan bridles at the idea cloud is a component of IP-based electronic security applications of the future.

“The Risco cloud is here now and provides the major component of our service to customers, offering firmware updates, and connectivity for installers to their systems, allowing remote maintenance as well as the ability for end users to perform all manner of tasks remotely, including live view, access doors, turn on lighting and heating,” he says.

According to O’Callaghan, there are a number of vital elements in any cloud-based electronic security solution.

“The most important element in a cloud based solution for electronic security is security, this goes without saying, and Risco has worked very hard at building its architecture to ensure the integrity of its network,” he says.

“Second comes scalability - the system needs to be able to support a continuing increase in systems being connected to the network, which just doesn’t mean panels, but also the increase in the number of other connections as well, such as smartphones, computers, IP CCTV cameras, etc. Thirdly there’s ease of installation and use and Risco products have been designed with the installer in mind.”

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When it comes to the greatest challenge for the future of cloud security applications in Australia, O’Callaghan maintains it’s about people.

“The greatest challenge would be building trust with the Australian consumer, and all the other challenges are a part of achieving this level of trust,” he says. “Meanwhile, the greatest strength of the Risco cloud, is providing accessibility to the end user for a whole range of services that were never available before, and that are now cost effective.”

According to Wai King Wong of Axis Communications, cloud is best defined by what it offers installers and end users.

“In terms of security applications, cloud solutions enable a cost effective and trouble-free solution for end users that uses the latest hardware and software to deliver security via cloud,” explains Wong. “Axis does provide such a solution, which is the Axis Video Hosting Solution (AVHS), and we believe that as networks become more widely available and more data centres are established in the country, takeup of this solution will grow.”

According to Wong, cloud will be a key component of IP-based electronic security applications in the future.

“It will be the future step to move into cloud-based solutions where systems can be in either private cloud (within a private network across a wide area network), or a public cloud solution which relies on hosting companies,” says Wong. “One of the key benefits is the utilisation of hardware in a more

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efficient manner.”

What are the most important elements of any cloudbased electronic security solution – for instance, adequate layers of infrastructure, the user interface, lack of latency, encryption, other?

“With cloud-based solutions, the user experience is highly important,” says Wong. “Key requirements include low latency and highly secure transmission of information. We have a hybrid cloud solution where there is a secure connection from the camera to our cloud-based mediator server that communicates with the client and cameras. The solution is called Axis Camera Companion. The difference is that the recording is done locally in the SD card and the secure communication relies on the cloud-based mediator server.”

What is the greatest challenge for the future of cloud security applications in Australia?

“The biggest challenge for cloud solutions in Australia will be infrastructure,” says Wong. “Australia is a large country and to provide high bandwidth everywhere is a big task. Therefore the NBN project is greatly needed in order for us to move to the next phase of cloud-based security solutions.”

What do you see as being the greatest strengths of cloud?

“The biggest strength of cloud-based solutions is its ability to harness the investment of hardware/ software to reduce cost per user as each user shares the cost of hardware and software with a bigger pool of users,” says Wong. “That’s the key to cloud.”

Meanwhile, Honeywell Security Group’s product manager – CCTV & IP marketing, Anurag Mitra, describes cloud as “a remote host managing storage and processing data enabling you access from anywhere on any compatible devices. A cloud model enables flexibility and provides a means to look beyond the local drive and access much higher capacities over remote servers.”

According to Mitra, cloud will be an integral part of the network topologies in future.

“Currently, most medium to large organizations are incorporating cloud as part of their IT infrastructure strategy and while some of them have already implemented or rolling out cloud computing models, others are ensuring that they are prepared and plan to roll out in future,” he explains.

Does Mitra see cloud as being a key component of IP-based electronic security applications in the future?

“Yes, cloud computing will percolate down to security systems this has already started happening,” he says. “In U.S. and EMEA, Honeywell with Maxpro Cloud and Total Connect is one of the players actively offering these services including video verification with partner companies as a cherry on the pie.

“In saying that, new entrants are continuously entering into the field of cloud surveillance – just to name a few who are offering or will soon offer a cloud solution – Milestone, DLINK, Cisco and SmartVue,” Mitra explains. “Within Australia, Honeywell has launched Maxpro Cloud and there are few other distributors like Hills and other brands offering either cloud cameras or cloud services for surveillance.

Early movers to cloud solutions will be the SME segment followed by the residential segment, which at this moment is a bit price sensitive.

According to Mitra, the most important elements of cloud-based electronic security solution are reliability, availability, privacy, redundancy and security.

“To understand this in more detail, customers would want to be sure that their video footage is in safe hands with proper security employed at the back end ensuring encryption and tight authentication,” he says. “They would want redundancy at the data centre or server level so services are not disrupted or any footage lost in the event of failure, and they would want to have services available 24/7.

Furthermore, in the event of internet disruption, a

New entrants are continuously entering into the field of cloud surveillance – just to name a few who are offering or will soon offer a cloud solution are Milestone, DLINK, Cisco and SmartVue.

local site must have a buffer large enough to retain footage for streaming at a later stage.

“Last but not the least, comes ease of use when it comes to accessing and retrieving the footage. On top of all the technical parameters, ongoing cost will be another key element driving demand as customers will consider pricing when deciding if they are ready to embrace cloud now or want to wait for the cost of ownership to come down. In simple terms economy of scale will play an important parallel role in penetration of cloud services.”

Mitra believes the greatest challenge for the future of cloud security applications in Australia are directly related to the 5 key elements of cloud - reliability, availability, privacy, redundancy and security.

“Each cloud player at some point will be encountering limitations or resource issues pertaining to one of the above stated parameters,” he explains. “In Australia, with the NBN roll-out and 4G services, the bandwidth is not going to be a major challenge. In most cases an upload speed of 1Mbps is good enough if the cloud system has local site buffering and storage for bandwidth.

“For systems where each camera streams independently and does not have local storage, this system design will have limitations in terms of how many cameras can be deployed at a single site to make it a viable cloud recording solution given the bandwidth availability. More important challenges at this point include selecting the right system design and formulating a good business model which caters to all 5 key elements, as well as buy-in from the channel to promote such offerings.

“Customer education and confidence is an ongoing challenge as well as a work in progress.

Above all the challenges, the size of opportunity is very large, hence the future of cloud surveillance is certainly bright in Australia and this future is already taking shape in the US, Europe and South East Asia.”

What do you see as being the greatest strengths of cloud?

“Key strengths of cloud are reduced cost of ownership, no maintenance required for the head end solution and the fact that instead of capital expenditure, cloud is an annualised expense,” he says. “This is better in terms of spreading cost over a time period, leading to better tax savings. Finally, in the case of theft or fire or any untoward events at your site, the video footage is in a remote location with far better security and far better redundancy.”

What does Mitra think are the key cloud applications when it comes to electronic security solutions today?

“Video surveillance, access control and intrusion alarm systems are all viable for cloud model and an integrated offering will be the best formula for success,” Mitra says. “This is also evident from the success of cloud models in other regions.” zzz

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NEW PR O D U CT S H OWCASE / NEW P RODUCT SHOWCASE / NEW P RODUCT SHOWCASE /

EDITOR’S CHOICE

WHAT’S NEW IN THE INDUSTRY

FLIR TCX MINI BULLET

NESS XLINE AND LUX HW

l FLIR TCX Mini Bullet, powered by FLIR’s Lepton camera core,

l NESS’ motion sensor range has had a major update with

offers 24/7 high-contrast thermal video and high-performance built-in video motion detection. FLIR says TCX outperforms visible-light security cameras by providing the advantage of seeing clearly in complete darkness without any illumination, in bright sunlight, through smoke, dust or even light fog – enhancing accuracy and dramatically reducing false alarms.

Flexible for integration in any environment, indoors and out – even in temperatures as cold as -40°C – FLIR TCX is ideal for ensuring safety of public buildings, industrial facilities, large and small businesses, or residential areas.

FLIR TCX supports lighting control, people counting, retail traffic flow, and queue management, and enables a whole range of other applications including intrusion/ presence detection and video alarm verification.

four new models recently added to enhance an already comprehensive lineup.

The all-new Ness XLINE and LUX HW series introduces advanced PIR, dual and quad models from budget priced 15m standard PIRs to the XIR200H deluxe PIR with digital signal analysis and temperature compensation, the XDT200H dual technology microwave/PIR with and/or function alarm trigger and the premium LUX HW with quad detection, pet mode, night light and automation mode.

Distributor: Ness Corporation Contact: +61 2 8825 9222

Distributor: QSS Contact: +61 3 9646 9016

HIKVISION LIGHTFIGHTER 2MP OUTDOOR DOME

INNER RANGE T4000 LITE

l RECENTLY released by CSD is Hikvision’s Lightfighter camera,

l BOASTING a lightweight price and a little less hardware without

which offers the flexibility needed to overcome even the highest contrast environments. Engineered with industry-leading 140dB WDR technology, Lightfighter cameras see through strong lights to produce crystal clear images with true colour reproduction. There are onboard storage capabilities of 64GB, triple streaming and smart facial detection. Equipped with a 2.8mm–12mm smart focus motorised zoom lens and a 40m Smart IR range, this camera is ideal for many applications.

compromising on simplicity and performance, the T4000 Lite is fully packed with the features of the original T4000 security communicator. With a smaller price tag, it is the ideal solution for installations where the T4000 is being powered from an existing battery-backed alarm system. The T4000 lite is compatible with most alarm panels and simply connects to the panel via its telephone port, eliminating the need for a dedicated alarm panel phone line connection to the street. The T4000 Lite handles all alarm communications via its fast 3G dual-SIM and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet polled communications paths.

Distributor: CSD Contact: 1300 319499

Distributor: Inner Range Contact: +61 3 9780 4300

SECURITY DESIGN M12 CAMERA HOUSING l NEW Vandal resistant pole and wall mount housing from Security Design Co. The

M12 Series camera housing features stainless steel construction and an IP65 rating.

This design features greater adjustment than earlier models, 55 degree downwards tilt for viewing closer to the mounting position. Ideal for looking down stairways. The swing-down lid offers ease of camera installation from the underside of the enclosure allowing camera setup through the lens. The cable path through the body of the housing provides excellent protection from vandalism.

Distributor: Security Design Co. Contact: +61 7 54955699

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N EW P ROD

DUCT SHOWCASE / N EW P RO D U CT S H OWCAS E / NEW PR O D U CT SHOWCASE / NEW P RODUCT SHOWCASE / NEW P RODUCT SHOWCASE /

BOSCH FLEXIDOME IP 5000 AVF

NESS LUX HW PIR

l BOSCH Flexidome IP 5000 portfolio offers 1080p (HD) and 5MP

l NESS Corporation has released the new LUX HW PIR – a

resolution for sharp and highly detailed images. The varifocal lens allows you to choose the coverage area to best suit your application.

Using the proprietary pan/tilt/rotation mechanism, installers can select the exact field of view. Mounting options are numerous, including surface, wall, and suspended ceiling mounting.

The automatic zoom/focus lens wizard makes it easy for an installer to accurately zoom and focus the camera for both day and night operation. The AVF (automatic varifocal) feature means that the zoom can be changed without opening the camera. The automatic motorized zoom/focus adjustment with 1:1 pixel mapping ensures the camera is always accurately focused.

Bosch IP 5000 cameras are fully supported by Dynamic Transcoding technology and support cloud, NVR or integrated SD card storage.

hardwired motion detector with a white LED night-light. LUX HW features a quad sensor for superior detection, 15m x 15m detection coverage, look-down creep zone, high RF immunity, white light immunity, adjustable range, adjustable digital pulse count and a handy LUX nightlight.

Distributor: Ness Corporation Contact: +61 2 8825 9222

Distributor: QSS Contact: +61 3 9646 9016

GENETEC SV-16V3 APPLIANCE

DALLMEIER DF5200HD-DN/IR NIGHTLINE

l GENETEC SV-16v3 appliance is powered by an Intel i3 processor

l DALLMEIER’S DF5200HD-DN/IR Nightline has an integrated

for greater processing speed, flexibility and value for customers. It also offers connectivity to the Genetec Cloud Archives Service for extended video retention and reduced storage investment. With support for the Security Center Mobile and Web Client, the SV-16v3 network security appliance will provide real-time notifications, alarm management and video viewing within Security Center from any location.

The pre-installed SV Control Panel will offer a streamlined step-bystep set-up and configuration wizard for quick deployment. An automatic update tool will assure the latest software versions are installed as soon as the system is set-up. The SV-16v3 has been redesigned with a new compact case, while new internal hardware updates and software will provide better recording and support for local video decoding as an operator workstation.

adaptive IR illumination provided by semi-covert 850 nm high power LEDs. The new IR hood which is already included in delivery absorbs unwanted IR stray light and thus increases image quality in IR night mode.

The camera has a high-quality motor-driven megapixel varifocal lens that is perfectly tuned to the image sensor. The adjustment of zoom, focus and iris is made conveniently using a web browser.

Manual lens setting at installation is not required. In addition, different day and night presets for the exposure settings can be defined and adjusted.

Built into an IP66-rated weather proof enclosure, the camera is designed for both indoor and outdoor applications. The camera is operated via Power over Ethernet (PoE Class 0, IEEE 802.3af).

Distributor: Hills Ltd Contact: 1800 685 487

Distributor: C.R. Kennedy Contact: +61 3 9823 1555

CSD INTRODUCES SAFRAN MORPHO FINGER SCAN l SAFRAN’S MorphoSmart 300 Series - or MSO 300 Series - is a family of high-end optical finger scan

sensors, based on Morpho’s experience in the fields of lectro-optics and forensic quality fingerprint processing algorithms. The MSO 300 Series covers a wide range of applications: enrolment, authentication and identification in industrial/commercial and government environments and can have up to a 3000 fingerprint data base with fast response times.

Distributor: CSD Contact: 1300 319499

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RE G U LARS HELP DESK

HELPDESK

OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS.

lens with the same focal length. Using a standard 2.8-9mm varifocal lens and a 1/3inch sensor, the sweet spot is likely to be in the middle of the range at around 5mm where you’ll get an angle of view of around 50 degrees. At this mid-point in the focal range you’ll get the least barrel distortion and the least pincushion distortion. Having said this, 12 or 16mm focal lengths might be better still if the environment is tightly controlled.

Q: I’m working out a camera to best handle a face recognition system. Is there a focal length that offers the least possible distortion and the best field of view?

A: Yes, no doubt there is, but there are plenty of variables to take into account.

For a full frame 35mm sensor with dimensions of 36 x 24mm, 50mm might be the focal length with least distortion at a mid-focal point but this varies depending on lens quality. Some lenses of shorter and longer focal lengths have little or no distortion, while others are atrocious. The angle of view of a 50mm lens on full frame is considered the ‘normal’ angle of view – about 46 degrees – which would constitute a good compromise for face recognition.

Of course, your CCTV camera is going to be using a smaller sensor than 36 x 24mm. Let’s say it’s 12.8 x 9.6m – or 1-inch.

Crop factor will change perspective meaning you can achieve the equivalent angle/field of view of 50mm on full frame with a much shorter focal length. A 1/1.8inch sensor will have dimensions of 7.6 x 5.7mm meaning a shorter focal length again provides necessary perspective for an appropriate angle of view, while a 1/3-inch sensor with an area of 4.5 x 3.4mm will require a shorter focal length still to have the equivalent perspective of 50mm on a 35mm camera.

All other things being equal, smaller sensors do better in terms of perspective distortion than larger sensors, given a

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Q: We’re working in a large, fairly old city motel that has a weird and wonderful access and alarm system layout dating back to the early 1990s and no system schematics. In fact, outside of the admin area, the zones are completely random and the monitoring company reports show an alarm that has no designation.

Is there a way to build a schematic that is not a manual process?

A: Not that we know of. You need to get your hands on the site drawings and then mark sensors in on them. Some of the zone loops will be readily apparent but others will not be. If the loop is working, you should track it as far as you possibly can then estimate the most direct, most simple path it might take as a dotted line on the plans. In sites like this, zones loops often track with telephone cables between floors and along corridors.

There’s not much chance zone loops are

going to be cemented into place the way CCTV coax often is at major sports grounds but you may not be able to get access to find out.

It’s a tough situation. With large systems incorporating hundreds or thousands of alarm points, it’s vital the project manager develops a columnar zone schedule form recording zone numbers, as well as device type, EOL location and zone response.

Part of the zone schedule should include a floor plan of the site with sensing devices included. A copy of this schedule should be kept by the security/facilities manager, a copy should be retained by the integration company for maintenance purposes and a copy should be stuck in the system cabinet for the troubleshooters who will follow your team 10 years down the track.

Q: Which is the most reliable 3G mobile network for electronic security applications? Is it Optus or Telstra?

A: There are certain variables with this one – primarily location and contention but we are spoilt for quality mobile services in Australia.

A 4-month test by P3 Communications and CommsDay, which involved 8500km of driving through 13 cities and regional centres, found both Telstra and Optus to be excellent, with little between them and with both much superior to mobile service providers in other countries.

The P3 and CommsDay tests employed an array of Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones in a specialised configuration to objectively measure a raft of benchmarks including voice connection quality, call quality, and data services including web browsing, file transfers, and videos. Telstra scored best in metro areas and along key highways, succeeding 99 per cent and 97.6 per cent of the time. It came in second place in small cities and towns (98.4) behind Optus (98.6).

Something to bear in mind is that these tests were conducted at the end of last year and both carriers are furiously investing in infrastructure. The performance of each is likely to be even better now and a system employing dual SIMs and dual carriers outside of a blackspot - the tests found 4000 blackspots (nulls) around Australia is going to be a very reliable solution indeed.

Q: Would you recommend always buying cameras under $200 with integrated IR? Which is the best, in your opinion?

A: Off the cuff, yes. Small domes and bullets generally have the smallest sensors, the poorest lenses, the least perfect dome shapes and the least expensive overall chipset designs. There are exceptions where we see the same chipset installed in every camera of an entire generation – Axis and Sony spring to mind – but generally very low cost cameras come with compromises.

Given this, IR support is a good thing, though it comes with compromises of its own. Further, we’ve tested some low cost cameras – I’m thinking Axis here – that did better in low light than some full body cameras. This very market segment is slotted in for a searching objective test at SecTech Roadshow next year.

Q: I’ve installed a security and home automation panel but I’ve been getting issues with alarm sensors. The automation devices, which are Z-wave, are no problem but the 433MHz sensors are having issues with intermittent trouble caused by signal loss. We are not sure it’s an issue with interference or the internal structure of the building. What would you recommend?

A: Both interference and environmental Faraday shields could be the problem. You

The most vulnerable element of electronic and networked security systems is power supply.

mention issues with more than one sensor.

If it’s possible we’d be tempted to move the control panel and it’s transmitter/receiver higher – to another level of the building, or as far up the wall as you can reasonably install it. Something else you can try is moving the effected sensors a small amount to step them out of nulls in the signal. These nulls are spots in the environment where the transmitter’s signal is at its weakest.

The nulls are located at points where the signal crosses and re-crosses the x-axis of its waveform. A sensor with dual antennas will usually have one of its antennas located at a point on either side of an x-axis null. If your sensors have a single antenna then you’re going to need to move them towards or away from the receiver so as to find a spot higher or lower on the waveform.

Q: We seem to have some EMI actually inside the comms room where our equipment is installed. We’re getting random events on the system that nothing else seems to explain. The comms room is the only available space in the carpark of the building so there’s nothing we can do but try to find out where it’s coming from and shield against it.

A: When you’re up against a serious EMI path problem on a client’s site - especially if the problem is in a crowded control room you need to get back to basics. Establish the victim equipment, what it is and where it’s located. Establish the source of the EMI and work out its exact frequency range. Carefully ascertain every possible coupling path between the source and victim. You must consider every possible path, including grounding points and bonding points in which there may be poor conduction. Try to consider obscure possibilities. If there are capacitors involved in the pathway, remember they will become inductors in the presence of high frequencies, while inductors can switch into capacitors. What you’ll also want to know is whether the problem is intermittent, whether it occurs at a specific time of day or whether it occurs in the presence of any possible cause that can be re-generated to allow assessment. Once you know the nature of the EMI, you can filter the signal or consider shielding. zzz

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events OCTOBER 2015 ISSUE 370

CPSE 2015

FACE RECOGNITION PP 100001158

SEM1015_1cover.indd 1

l Manly Council’s Mobotix Pipeline l SA Councils Share $450k CCTV Fund l Inner Range: Inventing the Future l The Interview: Per Bjorkdahl ONVIF l New Product: 2GIG Go!Control l Perimeter Security: Beam Me Up l Monitoring the Internet of Things l Review: Dahua IPC-HFW4800EP 4K l New Product: SCSI DirectConnect

+

Date: October 29 – November 1, 2015 Venue: Shenzhen International Convention & Exhibition Center, Shenzhen, China Tel: 86-755-88309123 Founded in Shenzhen, served more than 8600 security companies and 524,000 buyers. The largest exhibition in the world and the most influential exhibition in Asia, holds its 15th event.

30/09/2015 3:48 pm

ISC West Date: April 6-8, 2016 Venue: Sands Expo & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV Contact: 1-203-840-5602 With more than 26,000 industry professionals and more than 1000 exhibits, ISC West is the largest security technology event in the Americas. ISC West’s attendees represent more than $US50 billion in buying power.

SecTech Roadshow 2016

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Date: May 4-18, 2016 Contact: Monique Keatinge on 612 9280 4425 SecTech Roadshow takes up to 20 of Australia’s leading distributors and manufacturers on a national tour – a simple and highly targeted touring tradeshow covering 5 state capitals over 2 weeks during the month of May. In 2016, SecTech Roadshow will visit Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

IFSEC 2016 Date: June 21-23, 2016 Venue: Excel Centre, London Docklands Contact: www.ifsec.co.uk IFSEC International which took place in London in June 2015, is one of Europe’s largest security expos. The event was a huge success and we're looking forward to 2016, when we’ll be back at Docklands once again.

2016 Security Conference and Exhibition

= DAILY, WEEKLY, MONTHLY.

Date: July 20-22, 2016 Venue: Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre Contact: +61 3 9261 4500 Put it in your diary now: 20-22 July 2016. Australasia’s premier security industry event, to be held at the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre.

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