Highways England has adopted an ONVIF-centric open standards approach to expansion and management of its national highway CCTV and traffic system. The use of an open, standards-based CCTV system allows the national road managers to support existing CCTV cameras while providing a pathway for adding new, ONVIF Profile S conformant cameras from a variety of vendors.
Highways England sought a standards-based approach for its CCTV and traffic system, which oversees motorways and major roads in England, to maximise the value of its bespoke CCTV cameras and to keep spend as low as possible. Besides an incremental migration from legacy analogue to IP, a standards-based approach offers the highways managers the ability to use new technology as it appears. Highways England will specify that any new cameras added to the CCTV system must conform to ONVIF Profile S, while recording shall conform to ONVIF Profile G.
Jason Moss, Technical Director of Intelligent Transport for Mouchel, the consulting group assisting Highways England with its CCTV. He aid: “Government entities and municipal councils are increasingly choosing to base their physical security infrastructure on open standards, like those established by ONVIF, to maintain a CCTV system that is vendor-neutral, flexible and future-proof. This approach allows Highways England with help from its system integrator Costain to migrate to an open standards-based system incrementally as bespoke cameras reach their end of life and are replaced with ONVIF Profile S-conformant models from different vendors with use-appropriate feature sets.”
Highways England and two other major stakeholders are also joining forces with ONVIF to establish standard interfaces that can be used to allow users of their legacy and future CCTV to securely access each other’s images. This will provide a truly open standards-based approach and provide flexibility in vendor selection to Highways England operations.
Per Björkdahl, Chair of the ONVIF Steering Committee, pictured, said: “This collaboration with Highways England is a valuable one because we are given the opportunity to work closely with an end user who is solving a very real problem shared by many organisations – the need to modernise their CCTV infrastructure without replacing their entire system. An added benefit of the collaboration is that Costain has become an ONVIF member and will bring a valuable perspective to the work of ONVIF in the future.”
About ONVIF
Founded in 2008, ONVIF is US-based industry forum for interoperability for IP-based physical security products. Members are camera, video management system and access control companies and there are more than 7,000 Profile conformant products: under Profile S for streaming video; Profile G for recording and storage; Profile C for physical access control; Profile Q for out-of-the-box functions and the Release Candidate Profile A for access control configuration. Visit: www.onvif.org.
