witness is part of the award winning AdvancedGuardTM surveillance system and provides an entirely new level of performance and flexibility to the challenging problem of securing large, open sites.
21 April 2010: Navtech Radar announces that they will be launching their new witness™ software suite at IFSEC 2010 at the NEC in Birmingham May 10-13. The witness R&D project has been lead by Chief Software Architect Guy Avery and is the culmination of 10 years continuous innovation and customer feedback.
Sales & Marketing Manager Jason Burger explains, “AdvanceGuard is a wide area intrusion detection system, but unlike traditional perimeter intrusion detection systems (PIDS), the solution provides surveillance and tracking both inside and outside the perimeter. The new witness software suite is an automated solution capable of allowing a single operator, through the use of intelligent threat analysis, to focus on qualified alarms over a large complex site. The software solution uses radar data with PTZ CCTV cameras and employs highly configurable and flexible alarm rules to manage multiple security zones”.
“The operator is presented with processed information which has already gone through the pre-configured alarm rules specific to the customer’s requirements. This dramatically reduces the risk of false alarms and increases the likelihood of distinguishing friend from foe. We have put a lot of effort into making witness highly flexible. This means the solution can be adapted to any situation ranging from a simple intruder detection system to a complex large area threat analysis application using multiple cameras and radars. The aim has further been to enable reduced hardware costs by better use of cameras and radar and facilitate better utilisation of man power”.
In response to genuine alarms witness will automatically co-ordinate one or more cameras to provide the operator with maximum visibility of the current threat. The cameras can be set to function independently or in groups. A single camera can follow an intruder indefinitely or switch between unlimited targets. When grouped, cameras will intelligently manage target allocation to maximise coverage.
For speed and efficiency witness utilises intuitive Windows based touch screen technology providing the operator with a simple and logical control interface, regardless of the complexity of the site.
For more information please see witness™@ a Glance below.
For a live demo of witness™ visit Navtech Radar at IFSEC in Hall 4 Stand C17.
witness™ @ a Glance:
• Highly Flexible Modular Architecture: witness™ scales to a large number of radar and can be deployed on a single platform or across multiple hardware platforms as required. The service based architecture allows for all modules to run as genuine systems services, hence prevents tampering and ensures reliable 24x7 operation.
• Centralised Configuration and Control: A centralised server handles configuration and coordination of all modules. The embedded central database records all activity including tracks, threats, system activity and alarms and can be interrogated for historical data on track movements and alarms. The system can be scaled to utilise any database or even work with multiple Witness systems talking to a single central database for very large deployments. The solution comes with a highly intuitive User Interface but can also integrate into an existing Management System user interface thus providing a centralised mechanism for integration with third party application security suites.
• Advanced Tracking Capabilities: witness™ can track multiple targets simultaneously. The highly configurable tracker can filter targets based on multiple properties including size, speed and direction. It is possible to work with different tracking sensitivity settings on a per areas basis either to reduce false alarm rates and/or to increase tracking capabilities per scenario/area. The data fusion capability facilitates hand over of tracks from one radar to the next, ensuring that a moving track remains identified as a single track within an overlapping network of radar.
• Sophisticated Behaviour Analysis: witness™ supports a number of powerful rule definitions that can be combined to create even more powerful compound rules. Rules can analyse behaviour over time, ensuring that targets who have already done something to arouse suspicion can be flagged with the appropriate threat level, hence jumping them to a higher threat level if they break further rules. Rules can be defined on a per areas basis thus enabling different behaviour criteria in different areas for graduated threat assessment. Rules can be tied to specific times, days of the week or pre-selected dates. Rules can further be set to react to repeated offences before an alarm is raised. Camera movement and alarms are tied to rules ensuring that warning and response is appropriate to any given threat. Rules can further be prioritised so that multiple incidents can be handled efficiently in terms of alarms and camera utilisation.
• Intelligent Camera Control: Cameras are not tied to a given radar or area but can be operated independently based on the most efficient use for the current threat(s). The operator can specify precisely which areas the cameras can ‘see’ within their field of view. This means, that within their fields of view cameras can work out what they ‘can see’ and won’t attempt to track things they can’t see. Likewise, cameras can ‘learn’ to respond to any areas they can see, even if it’s outside their normal area of responsibility. This greatly helps to optimize the utilisation of the available cameras. The ‘view now’ feature further enables the operator to select an area to view and then assign the most appropriate camera(s) for the task. Cameras can be operated as independent devices or grouped together. When grouped together, cameras will intelligently start searching for targets so the maximum amount of time is spent displaying threats. No camera will sit idle even if there is only one threat, as the group can be set to monitor a single target if required. It is also possible to set cameras to work at different heights in different directions taking varied terrain in the surrounding area into account. Zooming can be adjusted according to size of the target and more importantly, camera zoom can be based on speed thresholds ensuring that fast moving targets stay in frame. This affords the operator increased awareness of what a fast moving target could potentially be en route to interact with.
• Flexible and Easy-to-use User Interface: witness™ comes with its own integrated user interface called Sentinel. This is the part of the Witness suite that the operator will normally see and interact with. Sentinel works with a 3 level permission based system control; Operator, Supervisor and Installer and is responsible for displaying targets and threats, displaying and managing alarms, display system activity and log and manage the radar network. The user interface is fully interactive - based on touch screen technology - and works with 4 threat categories; unknown (white), friend (green), warning (orange) and threat (red). It further allows for interrogation of tracks - including looking at history - to see where tracks have been. Targets can be tagged as friend or foe regardless of the rules. Multiple Sentinel modules can be connected to the same witness™ system thereby providing a multi-user interface. Different Sentinels can be individually configured allowing for a different perspective of the same situation and it is possible for each Sentinel module to operate with its own set of rules. This means, that only alarms relating to pertinent rules are displayed, hence allowing different teams within an organisation to react to different geographical areas and alarms all coming from the same radar network thus creating, for example, a perimeter security and internal situation awareness scenario simultaneously. System status and radar health check are displayed for quick assessment and overall system diagnostics.
• Third party Integration: witness supports export of live data – both targets and alarms – through XML. Incoming commands are supported through XML over Ethernet or via a web service API. This allows for third party control of key functions within the system such as cancelling alarms, camera override etc. witness™ can further interface to dry-contact relays in order to facilitate control of other devices or provide alarm triggers as required.
Navtech’s AdvanceGuard™ 350-X solution won the Detektor International Innovative Achievement Award for Alarm & Detection 2009, and was a finalist with the same product for Intruder Alarm Product of the Year at IFSEC 2009 Awards and a finalist at Security Excellence Awards 2009 for Security Innovation of the Year. In March 2010 Navtech Radar in partnership with Bath University and associate Anthony D’Souza was awarded the prestigious KTP Award building on EPSRC funded research, sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA). Navtech Radar was further awarded Britain’s highest accolade – The Queen’s Award for Enterprises 2010 - for their innovative design and manufacture of radar based sensors for security surveillance, industrial automation and traffic sensing in April 2010. More information can be found on www.navtechradar.com.
