Vumacam’s vision is to make South Africa’s streets, property and homes safer. Part of South African Licensed Infrastructure service provider Vumatel, Vumacam installs, manages and maintains wide-area CCTV networks for both government gencies and private clients, including major South African municipalities, government departments, the country’s two largest insurance sector companies,

The security challenge

As a city, Johannesburg faces multiple security challenges. It has one of the highest murder rates in the world and overall levels of crime, violence, vandalism, and theft are high when set against international benchmarks. The City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality collaborated with Vumacam to roll out a network of over 50,000 security cameras to be mounted on street poles with the aim of offering a much greater degree of 24-hour protection to residents and businesses.

The Municipality wanted constant real-time surveillance of its network of cameras so that police and other services could be alerted immediately to any suspicious behaviour or emergencies.

Relying solely on real-time human surveillance presents a number of very significant challenges:

Challenges:

• The capacity of a human operator monitoring CCTV to spot incidents reduces dramatically as the number of monitors increases.
• When faced with viewing multiple monitors, operators can only effectively focus on a few selected screens.
• Camera feeds receiving the most attention can vary according to the time of day or night,

The Municipality was concerned therefore that human surveillance would not offer taxpayers value for money nor the additional security protection they sought.

Vumacam chose IntelexVision’s iSentry video surveillance software on Milestone VMS. Using cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence technology, iSentry monitors multiple camera feeds simultaneously and in real time, effectively detecting suspicious behaviour and threats. When an incident is detected, it is brought to the attention of operators instantaneously so that they can analyse the situation and escalate accordingly, taking meaningful action in real time. 1,500 video surveillance cameras in Johannesburg have already been connected to iSentry with 5,000 more to follow soon. Eventually, the number of cameras connected to iSentry will total 12,000-18,000.

iSentry is currently used on multiple municipal and government agency projects such as the South African Police Service. Our monitoring solution has also been deployed within factories, shopping malls, hospitals, airports, mines, logistics firms, and solar farms. iSentry can be deployed on new, legacy, as well as hybrid CCTV systems.