In the evening, a woman returns home along a sidewalk in the housing area. She is followed by two young men with hoods pulled over their heads. They look around, run up to the woman and snatch the purse, then join three other people, also identified as offenders… The perpetrators were caught several days after running a new video surveillance system in Tvrdosin.

Tvrdosin is a town with over 10,000 inhabitants, located 12 km from the Polish border (on the Chyzne – Ruzomberk route). The region is full of tourist attractions – Meander Park Thermal in Oravice (thermal watering place), Orava reservoir (large artificial lake), and ski areas. The city authorities decided to build video surveillance system to prevent acts of vandalism and other offenses. The system should be cost-effective, also in long-term perspective (low operational costs of monitoring center).
Traditional monitoring based on PTZ cameras can be effective only when is operated around the clock by a qualified staff. In the case of the small town the costs would be unacceptable. DIPOL Slovakia proposed to build a system based on fixed megapixel cameras. It is the sign of a new era in video monitoring – use of a combination of megapixel cameras with wide-angle lenses instead of PTZ devices.
The system employs eight 2.0 Mpix IP cameras ULTICAM DS-852MF-E. Three of these cameras have been installed on the walls of the town hall, the rest are deployed in the housing area, called Medvedzie. This district is 680 m away from the monitoring center. The video is transmitted wirelessly with Access Point integrated with antenna – ULTIAIR.
Each of the five video streams is sent at data rate of 4 Mbps, which is sufficient for high quality of the images (1600 x 1200 @ 12.5 fps). The monitoring center is located in the town hall. The system is managed (monitoring and recording) by ULTISYSTEM software. High-resolution images, both live and played back from the archive, can be digitally enlarged many times enabling identification of people who do not respect the law.

Advanced solution The idea of CCTV system built in Tvrdosin and based on the use of fixed megapixel cameras allows to use modern, intelligent software for image analysis, thereby reducing personnel costs associated with the operation of the Monitoring Center. In the future, this type of software will replace people in many surveillance operations. Modern software enables automatic execution of such functions as:
detection of new objects, tracking of moving objects, face recognition, recognition of license plates, detection of long staying of a person or object, fire detection, counting people or objects, analysis of road traffic, analysis of behavior (e.g. fight)
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