Kenwood debuts site surveillance system
Kenwood USA introduced a wireless site-surveillance system this week that transmits high-resolution images using the company’s NEXEDGE digital radio platform. The system is designed to provide remote monitoring of critical infrastructure — such as power utilities, bridges, dams and water supplies — and areas that are prone to natural disasters or terrorist attacks, such as national parks and municipal transportation centers. A prototype of the system debuted in March at the IWCE conference in Las Vegas.
The system’s high-resolution camera captures still images that are then encoded and transmitted via an NX-700/800 mobile radio. The encoder is compatible with the NTSC and PAL platforms, and its internal memory can store up to 450 premium-quality images and up to 5,400 standard images. The images are received by an NX-700/800 base station, and then are displayed on a PC screen using image-viewer software, which can support up to 65,000 cameras and which automatically stores the images on the viewing computer’s hard drive, Kenwood said.
Images can be sent at predetermined intervals or manually. In addition, users can control image transmission remotely.
The system was developed jointly by Kenwood and JVC. It employs the latter’s image-compression scheme, which leverages the MPEG-4AVC/H.264 codec.
