Local Authorities
Glasgow City Council has a widespread CCTV infrastructure, consisting of over 390 fixed and wireless cameras covering large parts of the city centre and wider urban community.
These feeds from the cameras are sent back to a centralised control centre in the city where operators can view and control these cameras from their workstations. There are also a number of mobile CCTV vans that can be deployed throughout the city whenever they are needed.
Glasgow City Council needed to be able to distribute live and recorded CCTV from the Control Centre to other mobile users, such as Police Officers and Community Safety Patrol Officers who are equipped with hand-held PDA devices. They also needed to transmit real-time video from the mobile CCTV vans attending incidents back to the Control Centre to provide an overall picture of what was happening on the ground at the incident.
A cost effective solution was devised to extend the existing CCTV system with the additional of encoders at the control room with video feeds from each of the divisional workstations. Encoders were also installed in the mobile CCTV vans to allow real-time footage to be transferred back to the control room staff to monitor the situation whilst recording evidential quality video simultaneously.
High quality real-time images are now distributed to multiple viewers and viewed in the control room or on a hand-held PDA by mobile users. This provides full situational awareness and giving the user complete flexibility. This low cost system can be rapidly deployed in any location and is ideal for both permanent and temporary surveillance applications.