Belgium Town Upgrades CCTV with IndigoVision IP Video

The Belgium town of Koekelberg has upgraded its obsolete digital CCTV system with a distributed IP Video solution from IndigoVision. With a population of over 18,000, Koekelberg is one of 19 municipalities located in the Brussels-Capital region. The 45 camera system was designed and installed by IndigoVision's local partner Sicom, a division of Fabricom.

Implementing CCTV surveillance over large urban areas is technically very demanding. Whether it is to manage traffic or monitor criminal activity, remote wide-area monitoring creates a challenging environment for CCTV systems. What makes IndigoVision's technology ideal for these applications is its class-leading compression technology. Evidential-quality video can be transmitted across standard IP networks over large distances with minimal bandwidth requirement. This ensures latency is kept to a minimum, which allows PTZ cameras to be controlled smoothly from a distance, and wireless networks to be deployed. Koekelberg used an existing combination of fibre and wireless networks.

"IndigoVision's system has provided the town with an excellent CCTV solution, delivering superb image quality and a robust and flexible platform for future expansion," said Laurent Mertens, Koekelberg's Head of Security. "We were also impressed with how easily and cost-effectively the system could be upgraded in the future as new technology becomes available." The Town's original digital CCTV system was becoming unreliable and difficult to expand, but still represented a large investment. It was therefore important to re-use as much of the existing equipment as possible. The flexibility of distributed IP Video allows fast and cost-effective upgrades to existing CCTV systems, as original equipment can be re-used - as was the case in Koekelberg, where all the original cameras and network infrastructure were kept.

The security surveillance operators, based in the Town Hall, use ‘Control Center', IndigoVision's IP Video and alarm management software to view live and recorded video from all the cameras. Fifteen days of continuous recording is achieved using IndigoVision's Network Video Recorders (NVRs). "The video management software provides our security team with a set of professional tools to quickly and easily search and retrieve recorded footage, using a simple and logical interface," added Mertens. "We have already helped in many prosecutions by exporting evidential video for the Police."

The system is soon to be expanded to allow the local Police direct access to the CCTV video. As IndigoVision's system is truly distributed, this is simply achieved by extending the network to the police station and installing a ‘Control Center' workstation. As ‘Control Center' software is licensed on a per seat basis free of charge, this can be achieved for just the cost of an entry level PC.