Digital video surveillance cuts campus crime

Stephen Withers
Friday, 28 August 2009 09:04

Business IT - Security

The system is arranged so that security guards can only see live feeds from their own campus, but the central security office at Hawthorn has access to every camera. "Part of the system we really like [is that] we can bring up any campus from here," Goetze said.

The video streams are stored on individual campuses, and transferred across the WAN on demand.

"It works just as well from home," Goetze told iTWire, explaining that the XProtect system automatically adjusts the video playback stream to suit the available bandwidth.

Security supervisors are able to review recordings, and only managers can extract clips from the system.

"The guards love it. It's that easy for them to use," added Goetze.

The system has been welcomed by university staff, who have suggested additional camera locations.

The only negatives Goetze mentioned were the "CSI effect" (people have unrealistic expectations of the extent to which security video can be enhanced) and the way students have become slightly less protective of their property, for example by leaving notebooks unattended for around five minutes at a time in the knowledge that they are on camera.