Homeland Security Market

Global Homeland Security Spending will triple up to USD 178 Billion by 2015

In this booming sector it is expected that governments and others worldwide will invest more than 59 billion USD in 2008 to secure their home countries. By 2015 it is expected to be more than 178 billion USD.

Wey Group

The WEY Group is a globally active developer and manufacturer of unique solutions for secure, simple display and control of various real-time data for trading rooms, security control centers, health care applications and infotainment.
The Swiss headquartered group operates in 11 different countries. And is the only one-stop supplier who develops and manufactures virtually all of its products and solutions in-house. The use of first-class components, high-quality Swiss workmanship and a strict final inspection, guarantee first-class quality and flawless functioning of its Products.
The technically and ergonomically demanding systems consist of three main areas: Desktop Integration, Allocation Systems and Remote Solutions.
WEY has developed keyboards like no other in the world that allow a single keyboard and mouse to control several workstations and presets from a video wall with just one press of a button. A PC, whose application licenses are generally very expensive, can for example be shared by several keyboards and users. The keyboards are modular and can be individually configured to meet user, hardware and application requirements. For example in combination with the eyecon software the keyboard can control services and video wall presets.
The functionality of the WEY Keyboards can be extended with the WEY Allocation Systems and the Remote Solutions, in order to control the handling of video signals from the workstation, to the monitors on the desk over copper and fiber cabling.

Network based Video Surveillance

IP, or Internet Protocol, is the technology on everybody's lips. Nowadays it's hard to imagine life without the Internet or Intranet, and the same goes for the video surveillance industry.

For example, take the cleaning equipment manufacturer Kärcher. This German firm uses SeeTec's network-based video surveillance solution, which provides a whole range of benefits: "We were able to make optimum use of the existing network infrastructure," explains project manager Joachim Schmitt. This is because Kärcher uses IP video surveillance in the productive network together with other systems such as inventory management, CRM, and e-mail. By opting for an IP solution the company was able to implement a modern video surveillance system. Another plus, says the company, is the system's flexibility. "You can add system upgrades and expansions virtually at will." And last but not least, the system is simple and intuitive to operate.

It was back in 1998 that SeeTec developed the world's first IP camera management software. Over the past few years it has implemented countless projects, ranging from one camera to several thousands. Companies such as ARAG Versicherungen, Eurogate (at the ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven), Adolf Würth GmbH & Co. KG, ABN Amro, ÖBB (Austrian Federal Railways) and many more often use the software at many different sites around the world.
The SeeTec 5 software does not depend on hardware from a particular manufacturer. The system operator can use network cameras and video servers from any of the major manufacturers, combining their different advantages. This is just one of the reasons why SeeTec 5 can adapt flexibly to existing system requirements and is also more powerful and cost-efficient than conventional video systems. Existing analog video components are easy to integrate into the system. External systems can be integrated and controlled using a wide range of existing interfaces (TCP/IP, OPC, SeeTec 5 Embed API).
This includes eyevis video walls, for example. SeeTec 5 video surveillance can operate in the background in a small part of an eyevis cube, expanding to fill the complete video wall if a certain event occurs, for example if a camera detects movement.By using eyevis and SeeTec software in combination, the customer can extract optimum benefit from both innovative technologies.

Control station system – up to date

Control stations are used for various working areas in the field of control and safety: In communication centres, production, power plants, network control stations, control centres for power and water supply, fire brigades, rescue, traffic and buildings.

Videotaping systems, radio message systems, alarm sensors, video control, network systems, common wave systems, computers, TFT monitors, radio systems, documentation equipment etc. require a perfect integration of the technical equipment. Furthermore, the operating and display units have to be arranged ergonomically.

For this reason control stations are more than only a storage space for the hardware today. Technics may not be a burden for the high performance users of these work stations. Therefore, when developing and designing control stations, Leuwico attaches importance to a reasonable integration of the technics instead of hiding it. The required high flexibility demands modular furnishing systems for customized configurations. Conclusive design, mo-dern shapes and the creative accentuation of the basic principle are characteristic for the appearance. A positive aspect: The height adjustment as component of the programme. With simple adjustment mechanisms the single components can be adapted to the users, the tasks and the habits. This is an important criteria especially for control stations in order to fulfil the requirements for shift-working and desk sharing. Another advantage which should not be ignored: the change of the working position supports concentration and helps to prevent discomfort caused by a lack of movement and onesided strain.

Rectangular, hexagonal and curved basic shapes build a modular system. Manual or electric height adjustments enable any possible height for the work surfaces. The integration of digital and analogue technique into technic boxes and control panel housings gives the work stations a modern and light appearance. Monitor rails, add-on shelves, work place lighting, loudspea-kers and ventilators complete this system.

The programmes fulfil the more and more diversified requirements. Important criteria: The optimal solution varies individually, therefore, the different functions can be combined freely in order to offer a maximum of flexibility and space for the user. Some examples for control station furnishings can be found under www.leuwico.com ® special solutions.

Display technologies for control rooms: DLP cubes

DLP Cubes:

Disadvantages:
-more space required than with other technologies
-higher purchasing cost

Advantages:
-No memory or burn-in effect
-Easily extendable, a lot of options
-Perfect overview, high image quality
-Saving potentials, energy
-Low heat dissipation
-homogenous colour representation over the whole surface
-homogenous brightness uniformity over whole surface
-long-term stability
-seamless display nearly no gaps
-non-glare screen surface
-high viewing angle
-integrated optimizing functions
-designed for 24/7

-redundancy features available

-image enhancing features available like automatic brightness and colour correction

-control over network possible

There are also different options available in such cubes, like front maintenance systems and large screen walls on rails as space saving solution for control rooms with limited space.

Today this technology is the most used in control rooms. It is important to use these displays together with graphics controllers and display management software. In order to obtain a perfect system, all these components should be available from the same manufacturer.

Display technologies for control rooms: Plasma

Plasma Monitor wall:

Disadvantages:
-Burn-in of static images
-Usual image format is 16:9
-Large gaps in between the displays
-High power consumption
-Low resolution
-Not designed for 24/7

Usually this technology is not uses in control room applications, only in some low cost video surveillance installations, because of the problem of burn-in of static images and the other mentioned restrictions.

Display technologies for control rooms: CRT

CRT Monitor wall:




Disadvantages:
-High energy consumption
-Inflexible display
-Large required space
-High maintenance costs
-Complexity of display
-Old-fashioned display
-Bad ergonomics
-High thermal load
-No longer spare parts available
-With CRT monitors, burn-in of static images
-Large spaces in between the single display units
-limited screen sizes and resolutions



In general nowadays this technology is no longer used.

Modern control room equipment is supporting the human viewers

Modern control room:

Old style control rooms:

Video surveillance and other control room operations are very useful, but only if, as the experiences shows, people are sitting in front of the monitors or large screen systems. New ergonomic command and control rooms of disaster management centres, homeland security centres, border control centres, security control centres, power plant control centres, network management centres, traffic management and surveillance centres, CCTV surveillance centres, security centres, police or emergency centres are assisting the attention of the viewers, deliver additional information, features and create connectivity to other systems.

We all know the times, where operators where sitting the whole night in front of a huge amount of glimmering small monitors which they should have under control and to launch alarms and to trigger provisions. Nowadays this changed in most cases, due to the fact that people are not made to stare for hours on unchanging images. Investigations have shown that viewers monitoring several monitors, already miss after 12 minutes around 45% of the information. Additional 10 minutes later around 95% of the information is not correctly recorded. The security sector has recognized this problem and with modern video-analysis and new applications alarms are generated, which generate alarms and display the related scenes on the main monitor of the control room (in general a large display system consisting of DLP cubes or LCD monitors). Enhanced algorithms have decreased the rate of false alarms. These features relieve the operators and strengthen the effectiveness of the control room. But not only the innovative video analysis systems and applications are important in these control centres also the use of advanced large screen systems is a key factor to improve productivity and effectiveness of the surveillance tasks. Another important factor is the 24/7 issue, this means that all the system have to be designed for 24/7 operation, the best solution would be to have redundant systems, when one component is failing, the redundant one is taking over. This should also applied for the large video screens and related systems. Today there is a huge number of large video screen and monitor manufacturers which cavort on the market. But only very few of them can offer integrated complete solutions dedicated for 24/7 with redundant features. For example a lot of manufacturers offer only the display, but not the controller, which is controlling the matrix of displays and the management software to administrate and control all the connected sources and processes. That makes it important to choose a manufacturer who offer a complete solution, composed of displays (DLP cubes or LCD monitors), graphics controllers and management software. Of course in such control room applications it is not possible to use displays from electronics supermarkets, because these displays have in general no optimizing features for 24/7. Image quality is also a key factor for a perfect control room environment. In order to give an added value and additional features to the large display systems, the so-called wall-management software is essential.

Multiple benefits

The requirements of a control room team increase, for example firefighters want to see the position plan before the mission in order to see the details around the fire area to know with which dangers they must calculate and which equipment will be necessary. The chemical industry wants to know when they get an alarm message from the process control system where the problem exactly comes from. Images from cameras can facilitate decisions. Modern control rooms are using the possibility to use flexible controllable monitors in video walls to visualize CCTV images and other information.
Every time these are complex data from computing management systems, which are ergonomically visualized and adjusted to the absorbing capacity of the users, that they can work efficiently. The multitude of information must be displayed in a way that the operators can see immediately if something goes wrong, if any error appears or alarms are detected.
Nowadays it is also important to use large screen display systems which are able to accept multiple inputs. As IP video (streaming video) cameras are more and more used, but still analog cameras are used at the same time, also RGB or DVI sources as well as network sources have to be displayed on a large video screen. This makes it necessary that the manufacturer of the video wall is also having a controller which can accept this multitude of inputs at the same time without using additional external devices. The netpix controller series from eyevis is such a system accepting all the different source inputs.

The crisis case

The most important is a well organized presentation in a crisis case. In fact in emergency control centres the operators are normally only well-trained specialists, but in most cases they don’t have concrete knowledge of place, eventhough they must take decisions within seconds and have an overview on the situation with the available information and trigger the further steps by means of the deposited alarm plans. This is possible through integrated control rooms with intelligent software solutions. This starts with the graphical presentation. Big, high-resolution monitor walls, like offered by eyevis gives an overview on the situations, which can be seen by the operators in the control room, but also immediately by the management entering the centre. Additionally the directors of operation can get messages via SMS, email or directly on their desktop monitor at their workplace, which must not necessarily be inside the control room, it can be in the same building or even in other locations. This is also an advantage when teams of several control rooms have to collaborate in some cases.

Visual impact
As humans are very good in gathering information visually, therefore it is important to use display concepts and layouts where only important information is displayed, via alarm management in case of alarms, the for the alarm relevant information will be intruded or come in the foreground. So this means that not the quantity of displayed sources is important, but to have the relevant data available in a case of an alarm. In other words for example it is not necessary to view a camera image while nothing is happening, but it is better to have motion detection systems and when the motion detector is detecting something, automatically the camera image is launched and visualized on the large display screen.

DLP Cubes with SmoothPicture/Wobulation or native resolution?

Some manufacturers of DLP cubes use SmoothPicture or Wobulation technology and some use native resolution.

To reduce the cost of a single chip DLP® projection engine, Texas Instruments has implemented a technology called Smooth Picture. This technology, also referred to as Wobulation, takes half of the desired native resolution of a DMD chip and oscillates it back and forth to give the appearance of full native resolution.
Smooth Picture, is basically horizontal wobulation designed to produce a 1080p (1920x1080) picture with just 960x1080 mirrors; that’s half the horizontal micro-mirrors. Wobulation works under the same principle of interlacing, showing half an image at a time, but at such a fast rate that the eye is fooled into viewing the entire picture. The technology generates two sub-images, each one having half the horizontal pixels (960) of the original image (1920). The 960 micro-mirrors tilts at a rate (120 times per second) that allows each one to generate two pixels, 60 times per second. That’s how 960 micromirrors can generate 1920 pixels on the screen at 60 frames per second. Below are examples of the same image content shown on two different displays, one utilizing Smooth Picture technology and the other a native SXGA+ DMD™ chip . The SXGA+ unit utilizes one micromirror per signal pixel, matching the signal resolution and enabling a sharp and correct high resolution image. Smooth Picture processing has two pixels that share one mirror, creating a softer image with perceived high resolution.
The downside of this technology is that it reduces sharpness since the 1920x1080 image displayed on the screen is not painted by the same amount of physical micro-mirrors.
Wobulation is the humorously coined term when a single mirror is used for two pixels. The mirror spends 1/120th of a second on one pixel and then wobbles over to the adjacent pixel, and spends 1/120th of a second there. Therefore, using the same mirror to produce 2 pixels in 1/60th of a second. Once again, this rapid motion is too fast for our eyes to see. The advantage of wobulation is a reduction in manufacturing costs since only half the mirrors are needed. Some also say that the picture is smoother and flows better. The disadvantage of wobulation is lower sharpness and lower clarity levels.



Especially when displaying data the image is dramatically bad compared to native or true resolution displays.

Because the native resolution of a Smooth Picture device is smaller than the XGA and SXGA+ resolutions of most data images, these images are reproduced with only half of the information at any give instant. While the Smooth Picture process reproduces an image that the eye perceives as full resolution, this process is not able to display the full resolution all at once and has a tendency to create a soft image. This approach works well for typical video signals, but the net loss of resolution and sharpness can affect how computer data and graphics are displayed.

Large Display Screens For The Energy Sector

Water
Sewage plants, water services, hydro-electric plants, dams In the field of water supplies, sewage plants and water works, the greater demand for water, together with climate change and the increased volume of waste water has inevitably led to an increased volume of data. This information must then necessarily be displayed in more detail and yet presented in a user-friendly format. As the standard solution in control rooms for SCADA and DCS systems large screen systems are the automatic choice. The operators can monitor in real time video walls, flow charts, pumps, valves, pressure gauges, volume indicators, counters, status information, etc. At the same time, it is also possible to visualise on the video wall information from surveiHance cameras at strategic locations. This means that comprehensive monitoring of production and processing plant is possible ensuring that, defects and breakdowns can be swiftly identified and rectified. A primary concern here is, too, the safety aspect, which has such a great influence on the productivity and efficiency of such an installation
Electricity
Energy Production -power plants -energy distribution -energy networks -power transmission-municipal utilities-waste incinerating plants Due to the growing demand for energy, ecological aspects and competitive forces efficient procedures for monitoring procedures and monitoring systems have come to the fore. In this field large data displays in conjunction with SCADA systems are generally used for monitoring and management centres. The operators must be supplied in real time with intelligible, clearly displayed data. Ibis information consists for the most part of flow charts, energy networks, pipelines and voltage overland lines, gauge readings, pressure levels, pump und valve adjustments. Further applications which must be displayed are SCADA and DCS applications, graphic representations, production overviews, network tables, camera signals, customer-specific software and applications concerned with transmission, distribution and production. An optimal and reliable visualisation solution makes a decisive contribution to the prevention of breakdowns.

Control rooms for Transportation and Traffic

Roads – Motorways – Underground Railways – Trains –Trams – Canals – Tunnels – Airports – Waterways - Bridges - Traffic Control Centres

With the ever-growing volume of traffic, increasing accident numbers, fires in road and rail tunnels, assaults, vandalism and traffic congestion, the constantly expanding traffic network and also environmental concerns in the field of transport it is now essential that data and information received from traffic detectors, traffic signals, surveillance cameras or other sources are centrally administered, monitored and distributed in a control room, for example, in a traffic or tunnel control centre. This guarantees prompt checking and management of the data and therefore an increase in productivity, efficiency and mobility. The safety of roads, tunnels, motorways, rail networks, waterways and air traffic largely depends on the availability and readability of the data and information in the control room. The automatic choice for the operative tasks in a central control room is therefore a video wall system. All applications, data and video signals can be displayed in real time, so that even in extreme situations a rapid response is possible, enabling appropriate measures to be implemented immediately. In this sector, for instance, the following information will be visualized: graphics (maps, road or rail networks, time-tables …), GPS applications, camera signals, traffic detectors, signal systems, fan and ventilator status indicators, alarm signals and other monitoring systems.

Large Screen Systems For Security – Defence – Civil Defence/Homeland Security - Fire and Rescue Services - Emergency Services

Battlespace Centres - Tactical Analysis Centres – Deployment Control Centres – Military Command Centres – Air Traffic Control – Customs and Excise – Coastguards – Public or Private Security Centres – Alarm Control Units– Emergency Centres

Rising crime rates, vandalism and terrorism, as well as an increasing number of conflict zones have led to an increased need for observation systems in the field of security. Generally speaking, in security centres a variety of video camera streams, together with other sources have to be constantly monitored. Reliable and robust systems are needed, whereby particular care must be taken to respect data protection laws when handling private and confidential data. Video wall solutions should therefore be suitable for connection to installations carrying such data.Reliable and real-time access to such sensitive data must be guaranteed in a continuously operating system. Needed here are presentations, graphic representations (maps, networks), GPS applications, monitoring systems, video signals, tactical applications, PCs, etc.. Control rooms in this field support decision management, crisis management, infrastructure protection, CCTV surveillance, flight control, mobile commando centres for modern warfare, control of troop movements, parameter control, protection from attack, radar observation, etc.

Large Display Systems For Police, Fire Departments And Other Emergency Services

The growing danger of criminal activities, not only since September 11th 2001, and the increasing risk of natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes have lead to a rising demand for surveillance systems in the security-related branches. The information material from various sources has to be displayed in real-time and highest reliability in the according operating centres of these services. The coordination of surveillance, control and planning of reaction activities is the decisive task for the operators. Therefore all involved institutions have to be interconnected and have to work together to fulfil their purposes appropriately. Multiple sources have to be visualised on large screen walls, which can be delivered in almost any size. For example, it is possible to display a large number of video cameras together with graphics and other signals, simultaneously. An almost unlimited number of different windows can be placed on the large screen display in almost any size.
Large screen systems are predestined for such applications, since they save a lot of space, weight and energy compared with conventional monitor solutions. The major advantage of such systems is the high resolution and the integrated display of video and data signals.