Creating Smarter Schools with Smart Video Surveillance Solutions
Schools across the nation—from K-12 to higher ed institutions—are facing a growing set of unique security challenges: unauthorized visitor access, vehicle entry and exit, student drop-off and pick-up, property damage, theft and the extreme and increasingly all-too-common scenario involving an active shooter.
A high daily volume of students, staff and guests combined with events and activities occurring across a campus at all times of the day and night can create potential security nightmares. That’s why it’s no surprise schools of every size and levels are one of the largest users of video surveillance technology. Administrators and resource officers need to maintain high levels of situational awareness 24/7.
Having a reliable security camera system on campus gives schools the ability to mitigate risk and be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to security. It helps them deter any type of criminal activity by being able to track and monitor activity patterns.
Video surveillance technology has changed dramatically over the last few years with recent breakthroughs in digital imaging surveillance technology including Facial Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Further helping schools rewrite their lesson plan for security and surveillance are new solutions that incorporate on-board audio and video analytics. These analytics deliver actionable data that can drive intelligent monitoring for education facilities, helping administrators get a better handle on access control and monitoring of hallways, classrooms, and exterior parking lots.
Power of Smart Video Surveillance
The role of on-board analytics will continue to expand as schools combine edge computing and AI to achieve enhanced monitoring and search efficiency. The use of Edge AI, especially with analytics based on deep learning algorithms, can be a key element in a range of “smart surveillance” applications. These include object detection and classification, and collection of attributes in the form of metadata—all while reducing latency and system bandwidth burdens and enabling real-time data gathering and situational monitoring.
Smart video surveillance involves integrating analytics into an organization’s surveillance camera architecture. The results of such integrations can include improvements in threat detection, operating efficiencies, and solve numerous other common pain points facing schools. A modern, well-designed AI video surveillance architecture consists of five main components: cameras, recorders, networking, monitoring, and analytics.
Most schools today incorporate these five items to mitigate risk and enhance their situational awareness during any type of scenario. For example, knowing which doors visitors can access and exit the building is important when placing cameras. Working with an expert security consultant is a good idea when it comes to deciding where to place the cameras and determining the type of cameras that needs to be installed.
Most schools look for cameras with enough flexibility to cover large areas with great detail and at high resolution, selecting capabilities such as 4K resolution or Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) technology for challenging lighting conditions such as parking lots.
Schools Make the Grade with Video Analytics
Today, when you walk onto most school grounds you will see dozens, if not hundreds, of cameras overlooking the property depending on the size of the campus. Digital imaging technology have AI capabilities that can detect blacklisted individuals through facial recognition and unwanted vehicles through license plate recognition. Facial recognition data can also be shared with other educational facilities and some technologies can even identify certain unauthorized visitors prior to them gaining access. These advanced video analytics can be used as investigative tools in the event of a security incident and alert security when someone is trying to gain access to the premise.
Every detail in a school environment needs to be meticulous, making cameras essential to the 24/7 safety of students and staff. If a camera goes down, then the chances of an incident taking place increases which is why schools today need to be vigilant when it comes to deploying the best in video management solutions. In addition to cameras, schools need to implement a Video Management Systems (VMS) such as Hanwha Techwin’s Wisenet WAVE VMS that integrates and manages hundreds of cameras simultaneously. This is a perfect example of a feature-rich video management solution capable of supporting up to 128 IP video streams per server.
When properly and effectively deployed, intelligent video surveillance solutions can deliver an optimal combination of coverage and operational efficiency to help schools make the grade when it comes to security.
For further information on Hanwha’s Intelligent Video Solutions Built For Education, visit www.hanwhasecurity.com.
Sponsored by Hanwha
