Intelligent surveillance solutions

Matthew Fletcher is Senior Product Marketing Manager EMEA, Video Intelligence Solutions, for Verint Systems Inc; Cedric Vansteenkiste is Head of Sales and Marketing for Telindus Surveillance Solutions. Here, both men discuss the advent of state-of-the-art video surveillance solutions, and their impact on the oil and gas sector.

O&G. What specific surveillance challenges do oil and gas companies face?
CV. Oil and gas installations usually cover huge areas, are often located both onshore and offshore and are linked by vulnerable networks of pipelines and support facilities spread throughout a country or region. The main challenge for a surveillance system is in monitoring such an extensive geographical area: different aspects of surveillance may be required in different areas.

Surveillance must consist of a video system fully integrated with other systems such as intruder detection and access control, with combinations of these systems deployed as necessary. Parts of the oil and gas installation may be geographically remote, but still need to have surveillance available to both local and central monitoring sites – the latter possibly being a considerable distance away. Thus a surveillance system must have networking capability over large distances and the flexibility to use different transmission media as required. Finally, one or more levels of redundancy must be built into the system so that surveillance is maintained in an emergency situation, when part of the system may have suffered damage.

MF. Oil and gas companies work in a strategic and politically sensitive industry, and face a number of threats ranging from terrorism, espionage and crime, through to potential disruption from activists. In addition, the extraction and exploitation of oil and gas requires large-scale facilities spread across very wide areas in the harshest of environments. It is often impossible (or impractical) to man these facilities, leaving them further exposed to malicious attack.

Surveillance systems have to work cost-effectively across large distances, support remote monitoring, management and control, and ‘scale’ to cope with large numbers of cameras and sensors located in the harshest of natural environments. They also need to provide options for remote monitoring and control of dangerous sites in the event of an evacuation.

Alongside the need to ensure safety and security, there is a growing need in the industry to protect against litigations. It’s no longer good enough to simply protect your staff and facilities. In the event of an incident you need to be able to prove that you had adequate systems in place and that they were used competently.

O&G. Can you outline some of the available solutions to help over come these issues? Are these any operational or technical challenges in implementing these solutions?
MF. The latest IP video solutions can be used to put video on an IT network and offer cost-effective remote control and monitoring whilst providing the ability to centrally manage large numbers of sites and cameras. Organisations with thousands of sites, and tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, are now able to centrally manage and monitor their security systems. By providing flexibility of location, these solutions make it cost-effective to move video to security staff, rather than having to locate staff on each site. This also makes it simpler to ensure, and audit, compliance to health, safety and emergency procedures. The latest video management platforms also make it possible to integrate video with other information, such as alarm sensors and access control systems.

CV. Telindus Networked Video Solutions can control large numbers of cameras within and around areas such as oilfields, refineries, and distribution pipelines. The live video streams from the cameras are transmitted over an IP network to surveillance control rooms located anywhere on the network, with fibre optics being used to network the video over considerable distances. Careful design of the IP network will overcome the difficulty of large geographical areas: for example, a partially distributed system allows local recording that reduces network traffic, thus improving the overall network efficiency. The networked system allows users to view remote parts of the installation by simply connecting to the required cameras, thus removing the problem of monitoring large geographical areas.

O&G. What best practices would you advise companies follow before choosing and deploying a solution?
MF. Companies should have a full understanding of their environment and challenges. Where are the critical areas and potential security breaches, where can the threat/danger come from, what risks are staff being confronted with? Security processes should be clearly stated and appropriate tools implemented to ensure compliance to them.

When choosing security systems, it is important to avoid the ‘proprietary technology’ trap and opt for open systems. A senior IT manager would expect to be able to replace one part of his system with systems from other vendors if necessary. This kind of choice and openness is now available from some, but not all, leading security suppliers. The choice of an open platform should ensure not only that ‘best of breed’ technology from different vendors can be mixed, but that information from different systems can be combined. As an example, when a smoke detection system raises an alarm it should be possible to immediately, and automatically, verify the alarm via video cameras whilst automatically logging system and staff responses to the emergency.

CV. Before deploying a system, the customer must first understand the issues facing his installation. These issues may be specific to his installation, or common throughout the industry. Non-technical objectives need to be decided upon. For example, a security audit is a sensible undertaking that would identify areas of high-risk or potential failure. For each type of risk or threat, the necessary combination of video surveillance and other security systems (such as intrusion detection) can be determined and then addressed in the design of the surveillance solution.

The combination of security systems required will mean that the implementation of a multi-service network is crucial to allow all systems to work together. When considering which additional systems and equipment to utilise within the system, it is important to filter out ‘technology hype’ and evaluate the real practicality and suitability of other products and services.

For issues common throughout the industry, it is best practice to visit a similar installation to see how the issue has been dealt with and what lessons can be learnt.

O&G. What kind of cutting-edge technologies is your company currently developing to meet the future needs surveillance needs of oil and gas companies?
CV. Our latest networked video solutions focus on intelligence and automation. The system is fully integrated with motion detection, video analysis (including licence plate recognition) and access control, and can be set to operate in a manual or fully automatic mode. The latest Centauri codec is fully software configurable, allowing up to 112 video channels per unit to be individually configured as video encoders or decoders and with a choice of video compression algorithms. Furthermore, it is easily scalable with a choice of chassis sizes to suit every location, and has up to five levels of resilience and redundancy built in, providing an extremely robust solution to meet the industry’s needs. In addition, the Centinel networked video recorder is ideally suited to large installations as it can simultaneously record up to 250 cameras. Its intelligent storage feature automatically archives video at reduced frame rate to optimise storage space and reduce bandwidth requirements, whilst still providing quality video.

MF. The use of automated video content analysis can significantly enhance the monitoring of large perimeters and remote sites such as pipelines and pumping stations, and it is now possible to reliably detect people and vehicles in areas of risk. We are investing heavily to not only extend this technology to other applications, but also to reduce the cost of the systems and make them simpler to deploy.

Wireless systems can greatly reduce the cost and complexity of deploying video surveillance in harsh or remote environments, especially when protecting perimeters and pipelines. As a leader in the supply of wireless IP video systems as well as open video management platforms we are continuously enhancing our own wireless capabilities and ensuring that our latest video systems are compatible with emerging standards in the wireless networking world.

Case study 1
Verint’s Nextiva IP video solution was recently deployed to protect a major utility site. The implemented system was designed to provide detailed video surveillance of the entire perimeter, including automatic detection of intruders using the latest video content analysis technologies. This required over 200 new CCTV cameras, 150 of which were equipped with advanced video content analysis. Video, video content analysis, access control and alarm sensor information are all brought back to a central monitoring and control system for correlation.

One of the major challenges for the system was ensuring a low ‘false alert’ rate for the new Automatic Video Analysis technology. Careful planning of camera locations and the use of new LED based lighting technology has ensured that threats to the perimeter are accurately and reliably identified.

Case study 2
Telindus Surveillance Solutions Ltd has successfully deployed a networked surveillance system covering England’s entire motorway network. This multi-service system is similar to an oil and gas pipeline infrastructure: it is widely dispersed, yet still requires comprehensive surveillance, including telemetry facilities. The system is designed to support over 6000 cameras, all of which are continuously recorded.

The primary aim of the project was to establish a single fully redundant communications system on England's motorway and trunk road network. The key objectives were to increase safety, decrease journey times and increase the information available to the motorist. The network size required distributed power and local storage/collection points for video data, and areas with difficult terrain required wireless links to maintain connectivity.