While IP Products are fast becoming the Security Industry’s solutions for the Future, it’s nice to see a forward thinking company like NESS & ACTi looking after the past. Ness Security Products the Australian ACTi Corp IP products distributor recently supplied one of their Premium IP Integration companies a design concept using ACTi Video Servers and IR low light cameras. The concept design was immediately accepted as the ideal IP Video solution to ensure that Australia’s oldest “Prehistoric Caves” never become just another part of History.

The Caves are without question; Australia’s most impressive limestone caves, and are the World’s oldest discovered open caves at around 100 million years of age. There are currently nine show caves open to the public with spectacular lighting, underground rivers and cave formations that amaze thousands of visitors every year.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many tourist destinations, the mass of visitors that continually pass through these magnificent caves have had a significant impact its wellbeing. Now while some of this impact is due to natural corrosion, many of the problems have been caused by visitors damaging and vandalizing parts of the cave, in their attempt to take a little piece of the beauty home with them.

This is where the ACTi IP Servers comes to the rescue. Their latest Mpeg4 IP Surveillance System is being successfully used to monitor visitor’s movements and activities throughout the caves. With very low light levels within the caves, Low Lux camera’s are being used in conjunction with ACTi’s D1 resolution, DVD like quality, Video Servers, streaming video back at 25 frames per second to the video management software, Streaming Activator.

Of course, with a company like NESS & ACTi, you know that this is just the start. The 2140 Single Channel video servers being used have a couple of other benefits that make them the perfect choice for this application. The first, is the bi-directional audio feature that will allow security guards to verbally warn potential vandals or persons in the act that they must stop what they are doing, and continue on the tour. This means not only can the security guards see everything that happens, but they can also assert authority via audio correspondence throughout the caves without having to travel up and down through the caves.

These servers also have alarm outputs, which will be used to turn on warning lights and preprogrammed warning recordings through the local speakers when people cross into prohibited areas. These outputs will be triggered via motion detection settings within the Streaming Activator Software, which will help deter improper behavior without the need for anyfurther interaction, leaving Security Guards to more pressing matters.

John Nowacki International CCTV Products Manager for Ness Security Products Australia, has concluded that this system design is one of many powerful examples of IP Video and Voice announcement Integration Systems that provides not only IP video vision recording but more importantly an 24/7 operational and automatic interactive public safety voice announcement system based on the camera’s vision and Motion sensing areas, that purely relies on digital IP video information to perform endlessly in operation without the need or requirement for constant human intervention by a guard or complex supervisor in a CCTV monitoring room reacting to people walking into a sensitive/out of bounds area to the public.

Since NESS joined in partnership with ACTi in 2005 we have been able to offer our security integrators endless Video IP solutions like this system by simply harnessing the seamless multimedia integration possibilities that ACTi IP products offer with Ness Security products to form an IP based video security system that offers countless safety features to end users, operators and more importantly the general public visiting the complex.