Leo Levit, Chairman, ONVIF Steering Committee discusses how increased interoperability can aid the optimisation of safety and security.
For many years, public safety and city IT officials have navigated the growing complexities of a safe city infrastructure – a task complicated enough without the added element of a global pandemic. The effects of COVID-19 have added new pressures of deploying technological solutions for the enforcement of health and safety regulations and, in an ideal world, integrate those individual offerings into a city-wide management platform that provides that cohesive picture of public safety, traffic and environmental conditions of our cities.
The technology that enables us to deploy these solutions relies heavily on the ability to integrate different technologies into a centralised management platform and our ability to communicate with a wide array of edge sensors into this platform. The sheer number and variety of potential data points can be somewhat overwhelming: license plate recognition or traffic cameras to monitor vehicle speed and count, pedestrian activity at intersections; air quality sensors; fill-level sensors on municipal trash bins, or gunshot detection analytics deployed by local police. Additionally, much of the world is still grappling with guidelines to uphold for occupancy management on public transportation and in bus or train stations – as well as social distancing requirements in public places.
The implementation of these solutions requires a vast amount of data collection. As standards dictate how all this information is communicated, they are a key component to driving our smart cities forward – allowing municipalities to choose the right technology for their specific application. In a world where technology and features change quickly, the ‘build once and maintain forever’ scenario is not practical or attractive, as it severely limits an end user’s ability to try new technology and/or different vendors’ products and requires a substantial financial commitment to those specific manufacturers and proprietary interfaces. In this article, we’ll show how ONVIF can help to enable interoperability for smart city initiatives – aiding cities all over the world in implementing technologies to optimise health, safety and security.
Integrating the many parts of a smart city
There are operational challenges that accompany the many systems that are included in a safe city deployment. Achieving interoperability continues to present one of the greatest obstacles, particularly with video management systems, video recording devices and cameras. The most common scenario is that municipalities have several different management systems for city operations that were created by different manufacturers, each with proprietary interfaces for integration. To connect its different systems together, cities often end up with more of a patchwork approach to systems integration, for which the continuing costs of maintaining that connectivity between systems becomes prohibitively expensive.
Standards in smart cities
This is where the need for robust and well-defined standards comes into play, particularly for video surveillance, which is most commonly at the heart of safe city deployments. Standards, such as those from ONVIF, provide the common link between disparate components of safe city systems. Designed specifically to overcome the challenges in multi-vendor environments, ONVIF’s common interfaces facilitate communication between products from different manufacturers and foster an interoperable system environment where system components can be used interchangeably, provided they conform to the ONVIF specification.
ONVIF has published several specifications and profiles for effective integration of devices and clients in the physical security industry. For video security systems, ONVIF has released Profile S for video streaming, Profile T for advanced video streaming and Profile G for storage and playback. In addition to these video profiles, ONVIF has also released Profile C for IP-based access control and Profile A for broader access control configuration. Each of these profiles support the integration between access control and video surveillance. Additionally, the new Profile M from ONVIF is designed to standardise the communication of metadata and event handling for smart applications. This new profile will further facilitate interoperability as the market continues to see an increase in the number of smart applications for security, business intelligence and IoT devices.
Export file format
As cities and municipalities often rely on public/private partnerships with large corporate stakeholders, this often holds true in the safe city environment as well. In the event of an incident, law enforcement often request access to video footage from private camera networks that may have collected evidence of an incident they are investigating. To more effectively perform these investigations, the ability to playback video from different sources is especially important in responding to event types. These files are typically exported in different formats, making it difficult for law enforcement to correlate and analyse the video data, as demonstrated by the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, where more than 120 FBI analysts reviewed more than 13,000 videos before discovering key evidence in the footage. The ONVIF Export File Format enables law enforcement as well as private users to conduct forensic investigations using video of an incident from multiple sources more quickly and efficiently.
The specification standardises the file format and ensures a unified timestamp, which enables law enforcement the ability to accurately reconstruct a timeline of events during forensic investigation across a variety of different video sources. Export file format also detects modifications to individual pieces of footage and preserves the digital authenticity of the footage with multiple signers, for example the video surveillance operator exporting the footage as well as the investigating officer.
Having a standard approach, often a challenge in multi-vendor environments, will increase the efficiency of the process. The export file format specification from ONVIF has been adopted for use by US federal law enforcement and by the International Electrotechnical Commission as a global standard for video export and playback.
ONVIF specifications and profiles make it possible not only to integrate devices in multi-vendor video security system deployments in safe city environments but offer an effective common export file format that can streamline post-event investigations where authorities are trying to react as fast as possible.
The push towards smarter, safer cities will continue to grow – as will the need for greater interoperability as municipalities seek to deploy new solutions to meet new challenges. With standardised approaches, cities can leverage the individual capabilities of many different standalone but interoperable solutions to create a solution that meets their own unique needs.
This article was originally published in the July edition of Security Journal UK. To get your FREE digital copy, click here.
