THE annual SIG
conference and expo, which is targeted at a government audience, is a little
different from the big annual Security show held in Sydney. There’s a weight of
physical and perimeter solutions and a justified heel towards SCEC-endorsed
products and niche solutions with very specific applications.

The feel at SIG
is different from other shows, too. With a strong conference program keeping
the 800 delegates occupied a lot of the time, visitation has a tidal flow and
when sessions are underway only a few trade visitors are to be seen on the
floor getting serious attention from unoccupied exhibitors. 

Given SIG is not
targeting installers and commercial IT and electronic security buyers this
state of affairs is to be expected – and there were plenty of good things to
see in Canberra and plenty of time to see them. I arrived at the show during a
conference break and things were buzzing in the entrance hall.

Further inside
there were new products to play with. First to catch my eye was Arecont’s new
10 megapixel camera displayed on the Pacific Communications’ stand. Buttoned up
in the familiar Arecont form factor, this is a dual mode camera that combines
the resolution of a 10 megapixel camera and a full HD 1080p at 30fps camera
into one camera system.

Available in
color, day/night and color auto-iris versions, this H.264 Dual Mode Camera
offers 33 times the of standard definition VGA cameras.

You can crop the
field-of-view to any resolution (5MP, 3MP, etc.), select 4×3 or 16×9 (1080p
HDTV) aspect ratio, and apply H.264 or MJPEG compression to best suit the
application. The cameras also offer a binned mode that combines and averages
pixels for better low-light performance, greater sensitivity and improved
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). But what was most interesting about Arecont’s
flagship megapixel camera was the price. It was crackingly good.

Also on the Pacom
stand was a preview of DVTel Version 6 incorporating touch screen functionality
– it was designed and allows an intuitive form of overall system management. On
the screen you pull icons of devices or doors onto a display screen with your
finger and the images of the area are immediately shown. The neat thing about
this new interface is that it simplifies management significantly.

Pacom was also
showing off product we’ve seen before but that deserves another mention –
including Panasonic’s SD5 technology and the new Axis Communications IP PTZ
camera and thermal camera – the latter must be the world’s most competitively
priced thermal imaging solution.

Along the way was
EOS, which recently picked up distribution of the Sanyo HD range – which is
both competitively priced and powerfully featured. Typical of Sanyo, the
company was the unsung pioneer of HD camera technology and this Sanyo range
from EOS really looks the goods.

Something else
that was very neat at SIG was a new CMS from Jonathan Nguyen’s Orion
Integration. This product, and that intuitive touch screen interface from Pacom
and DVTel, really point the way forward for user interfaces which have remained
stagnant beyond ongoing simplification for some years now.

The strength of
solutions like this CMS from Orion is that it allows operators to interact in a
much more intuitive way with their environment. Orion has had a long commitment
to engineering – not just integration. The company has 20-odd software
engineers in Sydney and in Seattle and the results are clear to see.

When you are
working the interface you reach into the scene manipulating and burrowing into
maps and images with your fingers – a bit like some of those very cool scenes
in Minority Report. It’s nice work from Orion and you’d be silly not to
recognise that in the same way Dick Tracey’s futuristic watch-phone in the
famous 1930’s comic strip came to life in the 1990s, kit like this CMS is the
first generation of a major new technology.

“I think this as
the way of the future – a three-dimensional interactive interface between an
operator and the surveillance system that allows operators to manage multiple
scenes more easily,” Nguyen explains.

According to
Nguyen, the CMS started off as a basic floorplan.

“We were working
on an enterprise system comprising 300 different floors across 10 different
buildings – that’s a tough solution to handle from the point of view of
floorplans,” Nguyen explains.

Another neat
product from Orion is a little NVR that Nguyen says has been a massive hit with
police forces and councils in Singapore, Malaysia and in the U.S.

“I think this as
the way of the future – a three-dimensional interactive interface between an
operator and the surveillance system that allows operators to manage multiple
scenes more easily”

Jonathon Nguyen,
Orion Integration

“This product
only draws 5 watts so it’s ideal for use as a stakeout tool in concert with a
standard 12V system – it has USB ports, RJ-45, as well as GPS and it reports
its position when the camera is activated. The system can be combined with
Microsoft virtual mapping so operators or controllers can see the location of
vehicles at a glance.”

According to
Nguyen, these solutions are designed by Orion Integration in Australia.

“It’s fun being
an engineering company in Australia because no one else does anything like
this. The only other company that does this sort of engineering is Honeywell.”

Now, while we all
know electronic security solutions are going deep IP the synergy is changing –
and fast. From being symbiotic solutions existing as DVRs accessible over a
network, or even subnets accessible from a VLAN, full IP solutions on shared
networks demand full IP support structures. Not just management – maintenance,
too. IT networks are generally managed by a skeleton inhouse crew and a team of
contractors and that’s how network-based CCTV systems are certain to be managed
in the future.

Recognising this
is Geutebruck Australia, and on its stand at SIG was a new Centralised Enterprise
Health Agent that is designed to allow users to manage their surveillance systems
across shared networks with great sensitivity.

“Typically in a
surveillance network using this product there’s a centralised agent with many
servers attached and many health agent consoles and these allow clients to see
what’s going on with the system and to generate reports, export them in the
form of email and keep up with what’s going on in the system,” explains
Geutebruck Australia’s Anthony Brooks.

“The new Health
Agent allows us to poll every server in an enterprise surveillance system. It
allows users to manage very large deployements from a central point. This was
developed locally but after evaluation it will be part of the general product
range out of Germany.”

Around the corner
was Senstar, which was showing its OmniTrax ranging buried cable perimeter
security solution. OmniTrax is a covert perimeter system that generates an
invisible radar detection field around buried sensor cables and goes into alarm
if the detection field is disturbed based on parameters like conductivity, size
and direction of movement.

“It’s essentially
VHF guided radar,” explains Senstar’s Tom Knowles. “The cable is incorporates
an aperture that gets larger as the cable gets longer to compensate for the
attenuation of transmission. An advantage of the solution is that it doesn’t
need to be buried deeply, reducing costs and simplifying installation.”

“The new Health
Agent allows us to poll every server in an enterprise surveillance system. It
allows users to manage very large deployements from a central point”

Anthony Brooks,
Geutebruck Australia

Meanwhile, on the
C.R. Kennedy stand, Les Newberry showed a new LG client software package that
offers powerful video analytics capabilities for LG cameras. After a test drive
it was clear that the LG software is super easy to use and navigate around and its
analytics capabilities were seriously capable.

“As you know we
are an LG distributor,” Newberry explains. “So when you buy an LG camera from
us you get a software package that lets you record up to 16 cameras with a
simple dongle upgrade to 64 cameras. And the nice thing about this is the
software has integrated video analytics built into it.

“You can do
things like people counting, crossing the line, object removal, camera
tampering, intruder detection, camera sabotage. You can import on Emap and when
an event triggers, that camera will come up on screen and take a series of
snapshots and store them in a separate directory. So when you buy a camera you
get the full package.”

According to
Newberry, images can be stored on local HDD or NAS, there’s full camera config
including firmware upgrades, image control, adjust streaming, H.264 or MPEG-4,
frame rate is adjustable, full bit rate, resolution up to D1, and adjust
picture size as well. There’s also audio enable and network configuration – up
to 10 users per camera, record scheduling, event action, pre-alarm and
post-alarm.

Over on the FSH stand
at SIG, Trevor Mackle said the company had begun to focus on the dollar and
carbon emission savings its award winning MEM Lock 2400 offered. The MEM 2400
Lock is already a greenie given it uses only 700g of metal compared to a
standard magnetic lock’s 5kg but as Mackle explained, there’s more to the
savings than that.

“In terms of
manufacture alone our studies showed the MEM Lock represents a CO2 saving of 68
per cent,” Mackle says. “We then looked at cost of operation and we were
fortunate to be able to compare directly with a building here in Canberra that
had 65 traditional large magnetic locks installed.

“We upgraded the
locks in this installation to MEM Locks and as a result we found we were saving
1500kW hours per year – an energy saving of 43 per cent. We could also reduce
the AH rating and cost of backup batteries, which was a further saving.”

Another
noteworthy product range we heard about at the show was Chase Security’s PCSC
range, a set of controllers designed to cart access control onto networks with
blue cable to the door – that’s really interesting for those who want to
leverage their entire access control system on existing LANs rather than
install analogue hybrids which network to centralised local door controllers.

“You can do
things like people counting, crossing the line, object removal, camera
tampering, intruder detection, camera sabotage. You can import on Emap and when
an event triggers, that camera will come up on screen and take a series of
snapshots and store them in a separate directory”

Les Newberry,
C.R. Kennedy