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PRESS CLIPPINGS
Subject:
MultiVision
Publication:
Network Computing Asia
Date:
1 February 2003
Video surveillance industry bucks
the trend.
By Oo Gin Lee.
526 words
1 February 2003
Network Computing Asia
English
(c) 2003 Miller Freeman Pte Limited
Terrorist activity
and incidents have resulted in companies and government
institutions re-evaluating their video surveillance
systems. Because of this, the video surveillance industry
is bucking the downturn trend in the IT industry, said
Dennis Li (below), president and chief operations officer
of Hong Kong-based MultiVision, a video surveillance
technology provider.
Quoting statistics
from Freeman Associates, Li said that before 911, the
CCTV market was initially expected to grow from about
US$5 billion in 2001 to over US$6 billion in 2005. But
with heightened awareness of security post 911, the
market is now expected to reach about US$10 billion
by 2005.
And the maturity
of several technologies has made it the right time for
companies to move their video surveillance systems to
the digital age, he added. Li said that five key factors
that make digital video surveillance a compelling solution
have matured and are now easily available. They are
fast CPUs for video compression, stable OSes, low cost
storage, broadband network availability, and the emergence
of the MPEG-4 compression standard.
Because MPEG-4
compresses video more effectively than the popular MPEG-1
standard, recording and transmitting MPEG-4 files is
more attractive without any significant loss in quality,
Li added. At 20 frames per second, a MPEG-4 stream needs
a transmission bandwidth of about 500Kbps, compared
to the 1.8Mbps required by MPEG-1. ?Basically, it?s
less storage and less bandwidth,? he explained.
And the industry
is fast adopting this new standard. Forty-five percent
of the world's video surveillance market is now using
MPEG-4 as the compression standard, said Li. These five
factors began to mature in 2000, according to Li, the
year that his company released its suite of digital
video surveillance products.
Since then,
his company has bagged several large scale digital video
surveillance projects including the Chek Lap Kok International
Airport (700 cameras) and the State Rail Authority of
New South Wales in Australia (5,700 cameras), the latter
of which comprises the monitoring, transmission and
recording of over 300 state railway stations.
It all began
with the VCR
At the beginning,
physical surveillance was the only option. Then came
the VCR. But it had serious limitations?each tape was
limited to three hours, lots of manpower was needed
to change tapes in a large-scale environment, and the
storage medium was also expensive and cumbersome.
Then the time-lapse
method emerged?several cameras shared one VCR and took
turns to record. Typically, 16 cameras would be joined
via a matrix switch and every group of four cameras
would record for about five seconds, then the next four
cameras would take over and so on.
While this
cut manpower, equipment and storage costs, the problem
was crucial scenes may have been missed when the cameras
were inactive. Also, remote surveillance was not possible.
With the emergence of digital
video surveillance, most of these problems are now solved.
Storage is continuous and much cheaper, there is no
need to change video tapes anymore, and modern management
systems allows for remote monitoring and control.
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Copyright (C) 2003, MultiVision Intelligent Surveillance All rights reserved.
