Delhi Police deploys city IP surveillance project

(08/10/2007)

Delhi is a city of 13.8 million spread over 1500 square kilometers (580 sq. mi.) with more vehicles than the three metros of Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata combined. Such a huge city with this level of traffic has enormous surveillance challenges.

Dr KK Paul, Commissioner of Delhi Police said, “Delhi today has more than 31,000 kilometers (19,250 miles) of roads and 4.8 million registered vehicles, therefore deployment of such remote surveillance systems in Delhi have become a necessity.”

DVTel, Inc. has announced the successful deployment of a highly ambitious city surveillance project with the Indian Police in the city of Delhi. Delhi-based Turbo Consultancy Services, Ltd. is the systems integrator on the project.

In the initial project phase, the Indian Police installed a mix of DVTel PTZ and fixed IP cameras in nine locations around the city. All cameras are capable of streaming dual video streams at 4 CIF resolution and 25 frames per second (PAL). Surveillance runs 24 hours a day and all camera streams travel over the network to the central command station of the Delhi Police.

Key requirements for the system included redundant servers, redundant archiving, and viewing and storage of all video at 4 CIF and 25 fps. Another important requirement was the ability to generate alarms for a number of pre-configured events including illegal lane changes, red light violations, illegal parking, and other traffic events.

The DVTel intelligent Security Operations Center Latitude NVMS (network video monitoring system) component’s distributed architecture also had to scale to support system growth in number of cameras, viewing stations, and archiving capacity. The iSOC’s integrated audio capability is used for announcements from the central command station to traffic points in the surveillance areas throughout the city.

In addition to integrating the cameras with the traffic light system to detect when lights are red and infractions occur, the system also zooms in and recognizes offender license plates for operators to monitor and record. The iSOC also offers video analytics beyond just event alarm triggering, and the Police employ analytics to detect object size, motion, and direction, as well as vehicle counting through defined areas of interest.

Such surveillance and video analysis has quickly provided practical information resulting in increased safety and traffic flow. For example, objects are defined as vehicles moving on Delhi roads. Cars and buses can be differentiated and the different traffic components can be counted and observed for illegal behavior—lane crossing buses, vehicles parked in no parking zones and even stranded vehicles that are blocking roads will raise alarms to generate corrective actions.

The DVTel system’s scalability is critical to the Delhi Police’s ambitious future plans. Inderjit Sehrawat, DVTel Country Manager, explained, “Given our success thus far, current plans call for the Delhi Police to expand the system over the next few years. The system is configured to support 300 cameras and with minimal effort we can scale much higher. The DVTel technology and system capabilities are exactly what the Delhi Police were looking for and we are pleased to be making such a strong contribution to traffic safety and greater productivity.”

Related topics:  CCTV cameras and domes   Digital CCTV   IP monitoring   Monitoring systems 

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