HAIX implements IP-based video surveillance system for indoor and outdoor surveillance of its production facility in Croatia

19 January 2010

For their new production facility in Croatia, HAIX were looking for a flexible, high-performance video surveillance system for indoor and outdoor surveillance of the production facility. The cameras had to provide the ability to adjust to varying lighting conditions from very bright during the day to dim at night.

HAIX also needed motion detection functionality that would help prevent break-ins and property damage. Bandwidth consumption was an additional concern, requiring the video surveillance solution to have specific compression capabilities while still delivering high-quality images.This combination of requirements pointed to an IP-based video surveillance solution.

HAIX uses two different Basler IP camera models. For indoor use, HAIX OBUCA decided on Basler BIP-640c cameras that can automatically adjust the iris opening, exposure time, and gain in response to changing lighting conditions.

To allow for outdoor surveillance, even at night with almost no external light available, HAIX OBUCA uses Basler BIP-640c-dn cameras with true day/night capability. These cameras are equipped with a mechanism that places an IR cut filter in front of the sensor in day mode and removes the filter in night mode. This allows the cameras to correctly represent colours using the visible light available during the daytime and to produce high quality black and white images when there is only IR light available at night. To protect the cameras from dust, moisture, and extreme temperatures, they were placed in protective housings.

All of the cameras are connected to a central monitoring station via an Ethernet network. Basler IP cameras each have the ability to transmit up to three image streams. All of the streams can be encoded as motion JPEG, and one of the streams can also be encoded as either MPEG-4 or H.264. On each stream, the user can adjust the output scaling, frame rate scaling, AOI, and encoder mode to lower the amount of bandwidth that the camera is using.

At the central monitoring station, the surveillance system is controlled and images are evaluated using NETAVIS Observer Video Management Software. The operator can make use of the different camera functions such as motion detection and alarm buffering. This means that if the camera detects a person approaching the production facility, an alarm can be issued via email, FTP, HTTP, software, or an electrical output signal.

An alarm buffer can be set up so that images are captured and stored both a few seconds before and a few seconds after an alarm event is detected. An operator can play back the buffer and easily see what triggered an alarm event. This way, a potential break-in can be stopped instead of just being captured by a camera.

Multipix Imaging are the UK distributors for the full BIP camera range.