Strengthening Your Perimeter Security With Integrated Interoperable IP Sensors

Securing a perimeter has become a complicated affair.

With myriad sensors available to bolster, or even replace, the standard perimeter fence, integrating and monitoring all of this surveillance data can be a formidable task.

Thermal security camera manufacturer FLIR Systems developed an innovative way to bring all of these elements together in a single solution: the Thermal Fence.

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By connecting and interfacing a wide variety of perimeter sensors, Thermal Fence provides an integrated solution for layered, fully-customizable security.

The Thermal Fence is a fully integrated perimeter security solution that provides accurate intrusion detection and instant visual alarm assessment capability while minimizing false alarms.

This solution works over the same IP network as an installation’s existing CCTV and alarm infrastructure, but all of a facility’s sensors, including thermal cameras, radars, RFID, shaker fence sensors, and just about anything else, are integrated into a single convenient display. This gives security professionals instant access to all of the critical information they need in one place.

Because it operates in parallel with the existing security video network, there’s no disruption to that network during the solution’s implementation, and no expense incurred for re-training on a new CCTV sensor networking interface. With its built-in redundancy, even if the existing VMS goes down, the Thermal Fence solution and all of its affiliated sensors will still be on the job.

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Custom tripwires and exclusion zones allow precise alerting to potential threats.

The core elements of this innovative solution are thermal security cameras. Thermal cameras make pictures from heat not light, so they can see clearly in total darkness and through smoke, dust, and light fog. They allow you to see more and see farther than any other night vision technology on the market today, and even see clearly when looking into direct sunlight.

What makes thermal cameras perfect for a thermal fence solution is that their video output is generally much higher contrast than the video provided from standard CCTV cameras, so thermal video works much more reliably with analytics.

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High contrast thermal video enables optimal analytics performance.

By combining their thermal security cameras with powerful control and management software, this virtual perimeter provides automated perimeter surveillance, intrusion detection, and alert capabilities with a much lower incidence of false alarms.

All of the thermal cameras and other perimeter security sensors are fully integrated and geo-referenced on a map of the facility for solid situational awareness and threat assessment, so assets can be deployed efficiently, effectively, and to their full advantage.

Because all of the sensors integrated into the system are individually geo-referenced and mapped, its innovative slew-to-cue function commands the system’s pan/tilt thermal security cameras to point at the precise coordinates of any alarm generated by any sensor on the solution’s network. This allows the operator to immediately perform a visual inspection of the alarm, expediting a human response to the event.

With its advanced video analytics, this solution uses algorithms specifically designed to work with thermal video, allowing operators to create customized rules for trip wires, exclusion zones, temperature alarms, and directional alarming while providing a much lower rate of false alarms than other analytics packages.

By making all manner of IP sensors and cameras interconnected and interoperable, meshing thermal video with mapped, geo-referenced sensor positions, the Thermal Fence may well be the model for electronic perimeter design for years to come.

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