A partnership between Manchester City Council and National Car Parks has created one of the most advanced CCTV systems in the world.
A total of 400 cameras now cover the city centre and car parks, and police report a 40 per cent drop in vehicle crime.
July saw the official opening of the sophistica-ted GB pound 3m control centre where NCP staff, monitor-ing staff and police sit in front of touchscreens and an 18m backlit monitoring wall. If an operator suspects an incident he can zoom in and enlarge the image to fill the wall. Individuals suspects can be tracked across the city and operators can zoom in to identify faces from 600 yards.
At the opening the digital system, developed by Synectics in partner-ship with IBM and NCP, was described as using the “highest and deepest level of integration of diverse applications”. The extensive media coverage of the system locally was thought likely to have a big deterrent effect on crime generally, making Manchester safe for the huge number of visitors who attended the Commonwealth Games.
Joint venture
The project started in 1999 when NCP and Manchester City Council formed a joint venture company called NML; the project involved private investment from NCP of approximately GB pound 10 million pounds. Since the company was formed it has funded a steady improvement in the conditions of Manchester’s city centre off-street car parks. The creation of the CCTV control centre is the latest development in this funding programme with the City council. But operations have extended beyond the city centre car parks, retail areas and night spots … the extensive reach of the scheme means that it can be applied to traffic and event management. NML says that as well as providing the highest standards in safety and security, it aims to “ensure that any criminal behaviour will be detected and captured on film with sufficient quality to allow a prosecution to proceed.
“NML strongly believes in defending the rights of individuals to walk the streets free from the fear of a crime being committed, either to them or their property. We look forward to developing this model of public-private partnership with other urban local authorities across the UK.”
Design and selection
The control room had to be designed around two distinctively different operations, “pro-active” council use and “reactive” NCP requirements.
The council requirement was for a system that would be used pro-actively, whereby the operators constantly patrol the cameras looking for on street incidents and work on radio information from police, retail or licensed premises. The system had to be robust and of sufficient quality for the images to be used in criminal prosecutions.
The NCP system, however, needed to be reactive, dealing with over 350 cameras across 21 sites monitoring over 100 devices. The central features of the system are the intercoms positioned at each device. The objective was to provide as much integration and automation as possible so that manual selection was minimised when operators reacted to an incoming call.
Design Strategy:
The challenge was to design a solution that fitted two very different operational requirements but built on a single platform with the criteria:
Design Considerations
With analogue technology such as CRT monitors and VCR’s coming to the end of their life cycle and the proliferation of digital technology, it was decided that, due to the long operating life of the system, the solution had to be digitally based.
The traditional design of individual CRT monitors displaying single cameras was replaced with large projection displays providing dynamic switching of virtual monitor sizes. The lists of sites and camera numbers was replaced with symbolic (2-D graphic-based) control screens. Touch screen interfaces replace mouse or keyboard control.
Given the large number and variety of signals that needed to be moved from the edge to the centre the only option was to have a fibre based transmission system that would carry video, data, audio and network traffic. It was decided that to maximise the future technology opportunities the partnership would own the transmission equipment and rent the fibre from a telco.
The recording platform posed a number of issues. Since the retention policy of up to 92 days would require 50 terabytes of memory (storing 3 billion images) it was decided to design in a robust centralised system. Given the scale of the platform it was decided that the solution was more an IT project than a traditional CCTV one, although products are available within this sector.
The selection process
The above definitions and scope of the system ended up driving the selection process. It was clear from the objectives and requirements that a number of the products would need to come from outside the CCTV arena. Products and solutions were selected based on the design criteria.
1. Signal Transmission: Following consultation with a number of telecommunications providers in the Manchester area a deal was reached with one to provide a diverse ring of fibre around all of the proposed sites. Six fibres (3 fibres in each direction) would be provided from each location back to the control centre. The fibres were installed in a ring to enable the signals to be transmitted in the opposite direction in the event of damage to the fibre network. To support immediate and long-term requirements both analogue and digital networks would be installed. The video, audio and basic data would be transmitted on the analogue circuits. PC/IP based equipment would be installed on the WAN which is carried over the fibre.
2. Display media: Monitor Wall: To achieve a dynamic visual interface for the operators, a high resolution, projection system was selected. Key to the success of the implementation of this technology was the projection driver technology. The product selected is used throughout the world for large-scale traffic management control room and broadcast studios. The Barco Hydra enables from 1 up to 30 images to be displayed on a single 84″ screen in real time and at high resolution. This flexibility creates a very dynamic and useful front end to the system. Although this technology has a high capital cost, running costs and the upgrade path represent a considerable cost saving over the life of the project.
Control and Switching: At the centre of the system is the control and switching matrix. A product that was both robust and scalable was essential. Synectics were selected as the supplier of this central element of the system (Synectics Tesseract video-switching matrix and Synectics Synergy touch screen controlled image management software). With over 100 town centre installations as well as a host of other large-scale installations, Synectics were thought to be the ideal partners. Their experience and capability of providing interfaces to various manufacturers telemetry equipment proved invaluable when the existing council cameras (80) were moved and connected to the new system, a process which took less than two weeks.
3. Recording Platform: The recording platform had to be large scale and very robust. Images are in constant demand by the police and other legal bodies. The retention policy (92 days) and scale of memory required to store the 3 billion images resulted in an IT solution provided by IBM. The image quality, retrieval process and reliability have been acknowledged by all involved in the project.
The control room
The Joint Venture Control Room, has two completely different operations side by side: the Manchester City Council CCTV operation and the National Car Parks operation. Also included is the Greater Manchester Police desk which allows swifter real time information to be passed to officers on the ground. There are also desks for NCP Car Park management and administration.
The eighteen-metre monitor wall consists of 162 monitors with 412 camera feeds giving a possible combination of 164,000 differing camera displays. The monitors are backlit projection systems which allow for dynamic switching.
A graphical user interface allows display in a variety of different formats: full screen, two by two, four by four and “polo”. This final format allows a larger screen to be displayed in the centre and cameras related to that camera displayed in relation to it. If, for instance, a demonstration is being monitored, police on the ground can be alerted to the arrival of more demonstrators.
Dynamic switching also includes macros: If a particular area is used routinely then these can be retrieved by the press of a button. This is of particular use at night for instance to display possible “flash points” like taxi ranks or fast food restaurants in the early hours of the morning.
Since the inception of the project the cameras have been used in over three thousand incidents resulting in over thirteen hundred arrests. In order to co-ordinate the retail crime operation sponsored by Manchester City Council, two radio systems are in operation. Storenet links the control room with over 180 stores in the city centre and co-ordinates store detectives from different stores. Nitenet links over eighty pubs and nightclubs and allows police to be alerted of drunken or violent behaviour at an early stage.
Car parking
The car parking operation has advantages of being co-located with the city centre operation. Police and Storenet users can be informed of known criminals entering the city car parks.
The car parking operation uses a seven and a half kilometre dark fibre optic ring. This links 19 (shortly 21) car parks around the city centre by use of car park machinery which is capable of interrogating the system at the remote sites constantly. This gives constant real time information about the car park capacity and equipment status. Engineers can be dispatched to equipment faults quickly.
The system is driven by touch screen and virtual maps of the car parks. Intercom calls using Commend equipment by Complus Teltronic, come in from the remote sites automatically. They switch a picture from the camera related to the intercom used to the spot monitor of the operator. This allows the problem to be seen as well as heard.
The Review Suite
All the cameras are recording constantly but at different rates. Everything displayed on the spot monitors is recorded at broadcast quality (twenty five frames per second) and all other cameras are recorded at two frames per second for the MCC cameras and at one frame per second for the NCP cameras.
Reviewing is an easy to operate system which allows the retrieval of images up to 91 days old in the case of MCC images and thirty-one days in the case of NCP images.
Operation is by keying in the day, date, camera, duration and reason for retrieval. The system determines whether or not it has been tampered with and then displays it. Images can be burnt onto video, CD or DVD and given to police for evidential use.
Commented Neil Robson, Engineering Project Manager – NCP: “This is a very efficient means of interrogating the system, if it is compared with the recent bombings in London where one hundred and seventy four thousand hours of videotape were collected by the police as a response to those events.”
The digital platform allows new technologies such as automatic number plate recognition and facial recognition to be bolted on in the future.
Combined equipment room
The Combined Equipment Room is the “engine room”. Images from MCC cameras come in over BT lines. There are slave feeds to two police stations and the council’s emergency-planning department. Images are converted from analogue signals to digital signals and passed through ingest servers or “chunkers” which make the code for the computer, allowing the information to be retrieved.
Information is stored on five hard drives to prevent its loss for 48 hours. This RAID memory allows instant retrieval for the first forty-eight hours of the image’s life – the most likely period when information will be requested.
After 48 hours the image is sent to a Linear Tape Off where it is stored for an appropriate period. When the image has reached the end of its recorded life it is dumped, unless it has been placed in the evidence locker where its integrity is guaranteed for thirty years – the maximum sentence allowable to allow it to be used for appeal purposes. The car park images undergo largely the same process but with a differing lifespan.
