For this edition, the company Seguridad Digital B&B, S.R.L., shares an interesting success story developed with Vivotek technology in which IP video surveillance is involved in 300 lottery points of sale in the Dominican Republic.
As recognized by the engineer Rodolfo Bertoli, representative of the company Seguridad Digital B&B, S.R.L., the project could be one more within the type of IP video surveillance, but it is distinguished by the peculiar feature that it is 300 small systems distributed throughout a country -so small that each system has only one camera- which are periodically supervised from a central office.
Traditional CCTV technology is often unprofitable for customers when implementing camera systems, especially since the digital recorder (DVR) involves a cost that would not be justified for a single video channel; while with IP cameras it is a viable solution, since the process of capturing and digitizing the video and audio are integrated into the camera itself, it is only a matter of installing the appropriate software on a computer that may already exist to make the recordings.
Similarly, Bertoli explains that the institution in which the system was installed, between November of last year and January of this year, is a consortium of lottery banks (Consorcio de Bancas Siler S.A.), specifically in each of its 300 ticket offices.
"In the Dominican Republic, betting is almost part of the national folklore, making hundreds of people circulate daily for each betting bank. It could be said that at least 30,000 people benefit daily from this system," he acknowledges.
Referring to the security conditions in his country, Bertoli recognizes that in the Dominican Republic, like most Latin American countries, there are areas where there is low crime and others where it is higher. In this particular case there are offices selling lottery tickets in all kinds of areas, neighborhoods or sectors of very high standard of living, middle-class neighborhoods, and also in neighborhoods of intense poverty.
"Before installing the Vivotek Cameras, assaults and robberies were frequent, even by armed force in the points of sale of this client. The Lottery is a product that is sold in cash and in cash, so many criminals know that on certain days and times they can find an attractive loot and go for it, assuming that usually the person who handles the sale is a single woman, sometimes accompanied by her young children, which makes them think that their misdeed will be easy and will go unpunished. " Underlines.
On the other hand, the representative of Digital Security B & B, S.R.L., highlights that another factor that has influenced, although it is not the only one, is that after so many natural misfortunes and diseases in Haiti, many people from that country desperately emigrated to the Dominican Republic looking for economic livelihood options, "the majority, we must be fair, they come to work, but a significant fraction corresponds to Haitian criminals who are looking for the easy way to get money, raising crime rates in our part of the island, which is a real factor that is driving many merchants to increase security measures," he says.
Technical aspects
Topologically it is a modular system, where each module or point of sale has an IP camera in its local network that also includes the PC and the Router for remote connectivity, the latter responsible for integrating each module to the Virtual Private Network (VPN) that links all points of sale with the main office.
"One of the important details that we had to take care of in the proposal is that the basic technical solution would be as economical and compact as possible, since the cost of an office would be multiplied by 300 to be able to cover all the points of sale, that is, a unit increase of US $ 10.00 meant an additional US $ 3,000 in the system", bertoli notes.
It also highlights that another fact is that the client did not want to invest in additional hardware for the recordings, at least not in the initial stage, so they had to offer a recording software, which was free and could be installed on the same computers already existing for billing in each site. Obviously without this software destabilizing the lottery ticketing system.
Thus, "the solution was framed in an IP camera that in our opinion has the best quality/price ratio on the market, with an integrated microphone, good visual appearance, discreet, which includes a free professional software for recording on PC and that runs as a service of the operating system being totally transparent to the PC operator in its usual handling", Bertoli ponders.
Turning to the purely technical aspect, our guest assures that "the selection of the camera seemed obvious to us: the Vivotek IP7133 model, since it has proven to behave excellently in the most diverse environments of indoor applications".
The IP7133 handles MPEG-4 and MJPEG compression formats up to VGA resolution (640x480 pixels @ 30 FPS), in two independently configurable transmissions, this is something that was particularly useful, since the bandwidth available on the private network (VPN) was very low (64Kbps – 128Kbps).
Therefore, Bertoli acknowledged that the cameras were configured with a transmission in MPEG-4 format, 640x480pixels, 15 FPS for local recording, and the second transmission in MPEG-4 format, 320x240pixels, 10 FPS for remote monitoring in case it was necessary to have access to live video and audio from the central office to any of the remote cameras without appreciably sacrificing bandwidth.
Based on this we can summarize that the system has 300 Vivotek IP7133 cameras, with 300 PC-based Recorders (using the free Vivotek ST7501 NVR software with the already existing computers at each site), and a supervisor station in the central office, from which they can connect to any remote NVR to review, copy, and/or back up recordings.
Bertoli also said that "the cameras are not displayed locally because it is not necessary in this application, thus saving the resources and capacity of the CPUs to be used by the sales software."
With the representative of the Dominican industry we also touched on the issue of the monitoring processes that are carried out with this equipment and the additional advantages, in addition to surveillance, that are offered in this project.
"The bandwidth limitation in the Private Network (VPN) was something to consider from the beginning, because the end customer was very concerned that video traffic could collapse their network, and is the main reason why it is not currently recorded remotely centralized live, but locally at each site, with remote supervision from the head office," explains Bertoli.
In the same way, he points out that in this scenario it is not advisable to remotely play the videos, being more appropriate to copy the recorded files to the central office to play them locally.
"An effective remote monitoring function could be implemented simply and at negligible cost thanks to the digital inputs and outputs of the Vivotek IP7133 camera, designed to integrate with other systems and/or implement advanced functions," he stresses.
In this case a panic button connected to the digital input was included and an application was programmed on the cameras to automatically send a photo of the scene to an FTP server in the central office when the button is silently pressed.
The event that sends the photo (change in the digital input) is also used to leave a mark or index on the recording made by the Vivotek ST7501 software, allowing to search more efficiently for recordings of interest.
As for the difficulties that arose when developing the project, Bertoli explains that technically the main difficulty was related to the computers existing in the points of sale, all of them quite old, of various brands, and running with Windows 2000 in a very basic version; so it was necessary to make some updates to the operating system and install some patches or "patches" obtained from the Microsoft website for free.
From the logistical point of view, Bertoli affirms that "without a doubt the biggest problem was the number of places to visit to carry out the installations. Three hundred systems scattered across most of the island were challenging as many of them were in regions that were literally 'difficult to climb' and where conventional vehicles did not arrive."
Satisfaction, a key point
Bertoli highlights that the end user is not only satisfied but is really happy with its Vivotek IP video surveillance system; first of all because their requirements were solved within their budget, and received an added value that was the remote alarm function with the evidence of a photo from the panic button connected to the digital input of the camera, a detail that they never thought would be possible until we showed it to them in the initial demo.
In the same way, our guest concludes that it is really incredible the large number of criminals who have been caught using this security system, it has also allowed to document and typify the "modus operandi", schedules, and dates of the robberies which has facilitated taking preventive measures and considerably reducing the security indexes of the end customer.
