By JULIE M. McKINNON
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Maybe you want to deter burglars with unobtrusive yet visible cameras outside your home, or at least provide police with recorded evidence to help catch criminals.

Perhaps you want to check in on your elderly mother while you’re at work. Or maybe you want to ensure your children aren’t messing with the gun safe or playing unsupervised around the backyard swimming pool.

Those are some reasons growing numbers of local residents are installing video-security systems as prices have fallen in the last couple of years. Fear of rising crime also plays a part in the increased use of home security surveillance systems, and the technology is being tooled for homeowner use, local installation companies say.

Toledoan Amy Licata had a $700 system with two outdoor cameras installed by Guardian Alarm Co. on her family’s house last week; one camera is trained on the backyard, the other the front. The cameras, which record whenever motion is detected, will pick up activity outside both of the Licatas’ children’s bedrooms, too.

“I always worry more about the kids more than anything, so I wanted to make sure they were safe,” Mrs. Licata said.

Home systems using digital video recorders maintaining footage a couple of weeks have been around for a while, but, even at half the price of two years ago, they can cost thousands of dollars. The advent of cheaper Internet protocol cameras systems, starting at less than $500 installed, has led to more residents adding video-security systems, said officials at Habitec Security Inc. in Sylvania Township.

Habitec has a secure Web site where residents can view live Internet camera feeds through smart phones and computers, a service that starts at $10 a month per camera.

The cameras can record short clips posted to the Web site when motion is detected or an alarm is triggered, and text messages or e-mails can be sent to homeowners, company officials said.

“People are getting more and more interested in security,” said John Smythe, Habitec president. “People are more interested in seeing their homes when they’re away.”

Added Pat Ehrsam, service manager at Habitec, of an IP camera home surveillance system: “It’s very simple. Anyone can operate it … Video is just becoming more and more a part of our lives.”

Officials at both Habitec and Guardian, a Southfield, Mich., firm with a Toledo office, said their main market for residential use remains alarm systems.

But numbers for home video surveillance systems are growing, and they are popping up beyond upscale homes, they said.

Surveillance systems areabout 10 percent of Guardian’s residential business in the Toledo area, up from about 1 percent five years ago. The company installs seven to 10 home video surveillance systems a month in the Toledo area, said David Goldstein, president.

Customers are not fazed by monthly surveillance fees that can run $60 for multiple cameras, which is higher than those for alarms, Mr. Goldstein said.

“People are willing to pay two to three times as much to watch their homes than to secure them,” he said.

A number of factors play into prices and monthly fees for video surveillance systems, including the type of equipment, number of cameras, how video is recorded and stored, and other services. Cameras can be fixed on one spot, for example, or have the ability to be panned around by a resident checking a room.

A surveillance system with two Internet-viewing cameras can be installed for as low as about $300, with monthly fees of roughly $25, and will make snippets of footage available on the Internet. More expensive DVR systems with multiple cameras, which typically start around $1,500 to $2,000 and roughly $40 monthly fees, record a couple of weeks of footage on the home equipment and also can be monitored through the Internet.

Mrs. Licata, the Toledo mother of two, said she and her husband had considered getting a video surveillance system for a while, and Guardian’s $35 fee includes full maintenance along with Internet access to check live feeds. Costs have come down, and their older child, 2-year-old Luca, having learned to to open doors was another reason to get a system installed, she said.

“It’s just for safety,” Mrs. Licata said. “It gives me that peace of mind.”

Honeywell International Inc., which offers various security systems, has doubled sales of home video surveillance equipment in two years. Overall numbers still are small, but declining prices for cameras and the proliferation of smart phones have helped make systems attractive, said Gordon Hope, general manager of Honeywell’s AlarmNet business. “It’s very early, very early,” Mr. Hope said. “But we are certainly seeing an increase in activity.”

At Video Security & Surveillance Systems in Toledo, commercial installations are about the same, but business in residential systems has doubled within the last two years as prices have dropped to less than $1,000, said Michael Wegren, owner, who would not give specific figures.

“It has been on the rise for probably the last year and a half,” he said.

Even some renters have put in video systems with the permission of property owners, although most systems are installed in middle-class and upper-class houses, Mr. Wegren said.

For some customers, crime is not the prime reason for having video surveillance systems installed. They use them to keep track of elderly relatives living with them or to check on children, some installers said.

“There is some demand for it coming recently from [increased] vandalism or people who have small children, especially people who have swimming pools,” said Mike Latscha, vice president of Home Guard Security Systems in Whitehouse.

Habitec has installed some video surveillance systems at house construction sites in an effort to prevent theft of copper and other building supplies, said Mr. Smythe, the company president. Second homes are another popular place for installing video surveillance systems, he said.

Sometimes the systems catch activity outside a homeowner’s purview.

In June, video surveillance cameras at a South Toledo home captured some images of the theft of a neighbor’s 9-year-old shepherd, lab, and Rottweiler mix. The dog survived two 45-caliber bullet wounds during the incident, and two people have been charged with animal cruelty.

Do-it-yourselfers also have alternatives.

For example, Toledo-area Best Buy stores in the last month have started carrying indoor security camera systems, which cost about $300 and allow monitoring through the Internet. Best Buy also carries indoor/outdoor security camera systems on its Web site.

Dan Bollin, president of Toledo’s Eagle Creek Builders and Transtar Electric, said he has been outfitting houses for eight years with structured cabling wiring, which allows for installation of video surveillance systems.

Such systems still are most common in houses starting at $350,000, he said.

“More people are more concerned today with security,” Mr. Bollin said.

http://www.toledoblade.com/article/20100801/BUSINESS10/7310366/-1/BUSINESS

The shootout unfolded a few minutes before midnight late Thursday.

The surveillance video, released by Toledo police detectives Friday, shows the Route 66 bar packed with patrons. A few seconds into the video, some people are shown exchanging words with other patrons, yelling and screaming.

A few seconds later, bar patrons scatter in all directions as the words turned into a physical fight. Some of the patrons scramble for doors. One person is seen rolling over the pool table toward the doorway.

About a minute later, one patron is seen hiding behind the pool table with a pistol in his hand.

An unidentified man walks into the screen from a doorway on the left side of the bar, also with a pistol in his hand. A few beats later, shots ring out. The people that remained in the bar duck and drop to the floor.

Upwards of 20 shots were fire in the exchange. Luckily, nobody was hurt in the barrage of fire.

In another view from the surveillance video, many patrons flee out of the front entrance of the Route 66 bar in a mass exodus. After a few seconds of momentary calm, two people are shown pulling out handguns. Both fire into the bar.

The alleged suspects face felonious assault charges or possibly attempted murder charges once caught, Toledo police detectives said.

Source: http://www.foxtoledo.com/

JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — Licking County Crime Stoppers announced Monday that it is offering a reward of up to $1,000 in hopes of finding two robbers.

An armed robbery took place on June 18 at about 7:12 p.m. at the Fredonia Mall, located at 6754 North State Rd. Police said that two men in their late teens or early 20s had handguns and robbed the convenience store.

Surveillance photos taken inside the store showed that both men had thin builds and were wearing red bandannas on their faces. They also wore sunglasses, latex gloves and baggy blue jeans.

One of the men is between 6 feet 1 inch to 6 feet 4 inches tall and was wearing a red baseball cap and a dark long-sleeve shirt. The second man is between 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall and was wearing a black baseball cap and a light long-sleeve shirt.

Police said that both men ran away toward nearby Ellas Park where their vehicle may have been parked. The vehicle that they might have drove off in was a dark gray or faded blue smaller sport-utility vehicle made in the early 1990s.

Source: http://www.wbns10tv.com/

Leonid Yaroslavsky of Tel Aviv University (TAU) and colleagues have developed a new video “perfection tool” to help investigators enhance raw video images and identify suspects. Commissioned by a defence-related company to improve what the naked eye cannot see, the tool can be used with live video or with recordings, in colour or black-and-white.

“This enhancement of resolution can be a critical factor in locating terrorists or identifying criminal suspects,” said Yaroslavsky, a professor.

The new invention enhances the resolution of raw video images from security cameras, military binoculars, and standard personal-use video cameras, improving the quality in which the images were originally recorded or transmitted. This can mean the difference between seeing trees blowing in the wind and finding a terrorist hiding in those trees. A major challenge in video analysis is that images of objects become distorted over long distances due to variations in the air that can affect our sight and the “sight” of a camera.

Using specially designed algorithms, the team built a software application that lets cameras and video analysis equipment stabilise images, allowing objects that are really moving to be distinguished from chaotic atmospheric changes. The technology will increase the odds of identifying suspects in court, said Yaroslavsky, but its other applications are equally significant, said a TAU release. Instead of sending large video files over the Internet, smaller and lower-resolution files could be sent, which can be enhanced at their destination points. This could save bandwidth and time. His findings were published in Optical Letters and the Journal of Real Time Image Processing. Published by HT Syndication with permission from Indo-Asian News Service.

Source: http://www.securityinfowatch.com/Executives/1312096

Adoption of public surveillance has been slow to spread for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the “Big Brother” privacy argument. However, according to many, this aversion to widespread public video monitoring is changing, and that’s very good news in a slow economy for a struggling security industry. Not only does it mean more installations, but, in many cases, the municipalities don’t have anyone to watch the cameras, so they are contracting with private alarm firms to do the monitoring for them.

Communities like Atherton (where police are currently waging a campaign to tie in private, residential CCTV and IP-video systems to the municipal system) and El Cerrito, Calif., Birmingham, Ala., and St. Louis, to name a few, have large-scale municipal surveillance programs in place and indicate the genesis of a trend.

Ojo Technology security solution advisor Bob Kusche likens the increasing acceptance and quickening spread of surveillance at the municipality level to the explosion of Web commerce. “It is akin to when big business first encountered the Internet,” Kusche said. “Everyone was scratching their heads wondering how to use the technology. Security is only now starting to do the same thing with IP-enabled cameras, sensors, and other related hardware.” Kusche also points to public opinion as proof that acceptance will continue to increase.

“Polls show a 98 percent approval rating by the public for cameras placed in public areas,” Kusche said. “Ojo Technology presented a ‘Video 911’ presentation to 27 police departments last August in conjunction with the Atherton Police Department. That’s a lot of interest.”

According to California Alarm Association past president Jon Sargent, who is with ADT Industry Relations-West, quicker adoption of video surveillance solutions at the municipality level is a natural extension of a shift in priorities. Safety and security are now of paramount importance in reaction to heightened crime and more desperate criminals. “I have actually heard more people comment at city council meetings that they want more cameras in certain areas. Crime, and in particular violent crime, has gotten to the point where people are now willing to allow just about any tools available to fight crime,” Sargent said. “People just don’t care like they used to about having cameras around and I think most have accepted that out in public areas there is no expectation of privacy.”

Further, communities are looking to the security industry to help fight that crime and monitor those cameras.

In early 2008, the Office of the Mayor in Birmingham, Ala., hired systems integrator ION Interactive Video Technologies, an IP-based video and security solutions provider, to install surveillance cameras in various outdoor locations across the city. According to Richard Cruit, vice president of ION, the city also asked ION to remotely monitor all of the installed cameras from the company’s own control center, a rare opportunity for a private monitoring company. “Municipalities normally set up their own monitoring stations within the police station,” Cruit said. “We’ve got a very unusual arrangement with the city of Birmingham. They basically thought we could do it better.”

Cruit explained that while the situation with ION in Birmingham is not industry standard, more opportunities are opening up, and the current expectation of public surveillance to promote safety is spreading rapidly into the private sector. “This is good for the industry. No doubt about that. With the municipal contracts come more commercial contracts. Because as the municipalities bring these systems online, there’s more awareness of it,” Cruit said. “Then the private sector takes a look at it and says, ‘Well golly, if they can do it, we can do it. We’ve got an apartment complex or a large facility and we want to make sure it’s surveilled.’ It’s a natural progression.”

Carey Boethel, vice president, business unit head for security solutions U.S., Siemens Building Technologies, sees increased opportunity given the new trend toward security-critical infrastructure, much of it controlled by local governments. “Today we’re able to capitalize on a couple of different trends in the marketplace that we see occurring, including the continued spending in the critical infrastructure space. We can aggregate all these technologies, and we’re doing that from our command centers. We’re monitoring critical infrastructure on behalf of municipalities,” Boethel said. “We’re also doing managed services from there, hosting access and video. The guard-tour scenario is something that we do every day … RMR is a by-product of that.”

Mike Hackett, CEO and president of St. Louis-based Hackett Security says the need for vigilance, especially in urban centers where many cities are revitalizing, is paramount. A rebuilt downtown does no good if people don’t feel safe, Hackett points out. “In most cities you have most of the growth in the ring of the donut. The center is so built out that they go farther and farther out, but now we’re rebuilding on the inside of the donut,” Hackett said. “So we put cameras up in coordination with local business owners and when the cameras start to see a group of people … [the business association will] just make sure that they’ve taken the assets of the guard force and deployed them around where the people are, while we alert the police. And when you’ve got police and lots of people watching what’s going on, if they’re up to something unscrupulous, they’re going somewhere else.”

Sargent agrees that citizens are continuing to realize the way to keep honest people honest and dishonest people away is to openly monitor their public activities. “There are still some people who are paranoid of ‘Big Brother,’ but the tide has turned,” Sargent said. “People who do not do illegal things have nothing to fear and look forward to a safer community. People who do illegal things should be fearful, and will move on to other areas.”

A recent case study released by ION identifies the challenges of securing America’s downtowns. Paramount, according to the release, is to efficiently and cost-effectively increase safety and security with limited security personnel in sprawling downtown areas. ION’s solution includes the use of VideoIQ, analytics-enabled video surveillance cameras throughout the downtown core, which allows for prompt detection and notification of suspicious behavior, enabling guards to evaluate the situation and dispatch police immediately. “The public now accepts, and in some instances expects this. The municipality views it as the force multiplier. They can do more with fewer feet on the street,” Cruit said. “It’s already starting to drill down into the residential market.”

Security Industry Alarm Coalition director Ron Walters feels a time is coming where the industry and municipalities will work more and more closely together. “I believe that the future will be the industry uploading video to the 911 folks,” Walters said, noting APCO and the CSAA had recently worked together to pass a standard to allow direct digital communication of dispatch info between the security industry and police.

While these municipal installations have been largely closed to RMR opportunities, cities and towns will increasingly represent long-term customers who expect a partnership with private security companies. The successes, or not, of these early relationships will likely shape the future market.

Source: http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/?p=article&id=ss200907tx84Q1

SYDNEY, Australia–The term alone may be a new one for video surveillance installers, allowed Todd Rockoff, but the concepts and technology ought to be very familiar. Thus, the challenges for the HDCCTV Alliance executive chairman are twofold: First, get people to understand what HDCCTV is; second, get people to see why it’s better than what they’re already installing.

The working definition of HDCCTV: “A video surveillance system wherein broadcast-industry-compliant, high-definition video [720p is roughly one megapixel, and 1080p is roughly two megapixels] signals are transmitted digitally over conventional CCTV media, without packetization and without a perceivable compression latency.”

But Rockoff said it more succinctly: “The guy can plug in the coax cable and, voila, the HD image comes up.”

The charter members of the HDCCTV Alliance, which has as its goals both the creation of a global standard for HDCCTV transmission and proselytization through display of the technology, comprise much of a HDCCTV solution. Gennum makes the HD-SDI chips (the standard in broadcast HD cameras) that transmit the video by serializing it for long-range coax cable transmission and then deserializing the signal for display. Stretch makes the chips that take that signal and both compress it for storage on the DVR and pre-process it for live monitor display. Ovii will make the actual cameras and EverFocus will make the DVRs.

For Rockoff and Stretch head of sales and marketing Bob Beachler, the end display is the real selling point. Because the system involves no compression or packetizing of the video, what end users see on their commercial HD monitors is just like what they see on their televisions at home. At ISC West, Stretch showed a proof of the technology that allowed for 720p display at 60 frames per second.

“All the major customers said, ‘That looks awesome. How does it work and how do I get it?’” Beachler said.

This display, the ease with which most legacy installers will be able to upgrade current coax-based systems to HD, the relatively known quality that is the DVR for storage, and the lower price of analog cameras leads Rockoff to claim, “the megapixel IP camera is fundamentally inferior with respect to every business decision-making criteria: reliability, convenience, price and performance.”

Beachler is not as ready to throw IP cameras under the bus: “Is it fundamentally inferior? No. It’s just fundamentally different. There are capabilities that IP cameras can give you that analog cameras can’t. But you won’t have the latency issues and you won’t need the computing power because you’re just moving raw video around with HDCCTV.” He also notes that only a percentage of camera installations have live viewing at all. “For people compressing and storing for later viewing, that’s an IP network camera kind of place.”

Beachler feels the best market for HDCCTV will be for upgrading the current coax-based installations that would like to have HD capabilities.

Fredrik Nilsson, general manager, Americas, for Axis Communications, largely thought of as the company that brought IP cameras to security, said the HDCCTV Alliance only reinforces “how successful the HD concept has become in the camera market – people are really getting the concept of resolution. Putting myself in the shoes of an analog manufacturer, I see you would have nothing to compete with that so HDCCTV makes sense. All of a sudden they say, ‘Let’s try to do the same thing,’ because it’s technically possible.”

While it’s been technically possible for some time, it’s only really been financially realistic in the last year or so, said Beachler, because the HD-SDI chips were previously nearly $100 a piece. Now that Gennum can more reasonably manufacture them, they’ve become appropriate for many-camera installations.

As of June 16, the HDCCTV Alliance has its .9 version of the interoperability specification available to members (who must pay a fee based on level of participation), and the alliance plans to have a more robust specification, which will include things like controlling PTZ cameras, sending sound, and possibly sending power “up cable,” much like PoE, ready by September 1.

Nilsson called HDCCTV “an interesting concept, but it will be a huge investment to get it off the ground.” He also said it will require buy in from the major camera companies, like Panasonic, Sony, Bosch, and others. Beachler said he’s already been in conversations with those kinds of companies, and when it comes to DVRs, “I’ve got customers just waiting for me to make the cards.” He predicted a variety of HD DVRs and cameras by January of 2010. “That’s the great thing about this,” he said. “The roll out to adoption will be really quick.”

Source: http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/?p=article&id=ss200907QkjoVd