New hospital security technology: the dazzling array of technologies reveals the truth and essence

In 2011, the security industry continued to develop rapidly, and the growth rate of the video surveillance industry of 23% exceeded the GDP growth rate by nearly 2 times. The rapid growth represents the increasing attention paid to the industry and the rapid innovation of new technologies. At the 2011 Shenzhen Security Expo, the endless emergence of new technologies and new concepts gave people a feeling of "dazzling the eyes". Among the many hot words, there are the more familiar "high-definition", "networking", "intelligence", "standardization", "big security", and many less familiar "960H", "2M+", "HD-SDI", "cloud computing" and so on. Of course, chaos is also the standard for the prosperity of the industry, but as a medical user, how to grasp the industry trend in this chaos and choose practical and applicable products for the hospital's own application environment is a very realistic problem.

The technical route of hospital security development

At present, the application environment of the security industry and hospitals is a typical multi-generational industry. The analog monitoring system born in the 1980s is represented by audio and video matrices, which are still partially used in hospitals; the later analog-to-digital combined monitoring system is represented by video encoders, which still occupies half of the hospital security; and the new generation of digital monitoring systems, represented by network cameras and management platforms, have made great progress.

If the hospital security system five years ago was still in the analog era, the newly built medical security system has already been digitized and has evolved towards the intelligent stage.

Each technical route has its own advantages and disadvantages. Although the analog monitoring system has a long history, it is simple to build, low-cost, easy to operate, and can also meet the needs of small and simple monitoring systems. However, as the country's investment in the health care system increases year by year, and at the same time affected by the imbalance of medical resources, the scale of hospitals in major cities has increased rapidly, which has led to the rapid expansion of the scale of hospital security systems. The monitoring system with thousands of channels exceeds the management capacity of the matrix. On the one hand, the digital monitoring system solves the problem of management capacity, and on the other hand, it greatly expands the application functions and industry characteristics of the monitoring system through the management platform software. On the other hand, the digital monitoring system has many advantages, but its openness needs to be improved. Therefore, we should be more cautious in choosing new technologies. Among the many new technologies in the security industry, we selected several representative technologies for analysis.

HD

In the entire video industry, high definition has been a hot technology in recent years. At present, the medical construction standards of many provinces and cities clearly require the use of high-definition systems.

High-definition implementation mode, digital high-definition camera (HD-SDI): proposed by the HDCCTV Alliance, a digital high-definition camera based on the HD-SDI protocol. The main features are clear images, no delay, and can be transmitted through the BNC interface. The application mode is similar to the traditional analog-to-digital combination, consisting of HD-SDI cameras, HD-SDI optical transceivers, HD-SDI matrices, HD-SDI encoders or DVRs. It meets the requirements of high-definition monitoring while conforming to the original application habits. However, the display and storage systems need to be built separately, and the openness and expansion capabilities are relatively poor. The transmission link overhead requirements are extremely high and the transmission distance is short.

Network HD Camera (IPC): Based on HDTV standards, it realizes 720P, 1080I, and 1080P high-definition real-time image monitoring through video encoding and network encapsulation. The main features are the use of standard protocols, transmission through IP interfaces, simple deployment and implementation, unified management and easy expansion, and low construction costs. Mainstream manufacturers all take IP HD cameras as the main development direction. From the perspective of hospital security application characteristics, it tends to be centralized management and linkage applications. You can choose IP network cameras with more integration and richer functions.

Construction of HD system: It is an inevitable trend for security monitoring to move towards HD, but it involves the entire system. Not only the front-end camera needs to be HD, but also the transmission equipment, storage equipment, decoding equipment, and display equipment need to be HD. If any link does not meet the HD requirements, it will form a system bottleneck and reduce the overall quality of the system.

networking

The basic requirement of networked monitoring is information sharing and centralized management. At present, this is the bottleneck of hospital security construction. The construction of hospital information system is synchronized with the construction process of national information system. From the 1980s to the beginning of this century, the main work of information system construction is to build information highways, with digitalization and networking as the construction focus. Therefore, when the highway is built and resources need to be shared, it is found that the video surveillance systems built in multiple phases cannot be managed uniformly. The demand for networking and unified management came into being.

Networking is not simply connecting multiple systems through the network, but establishing a unified management platform to share resources based on standard protocols. Therefore, the focus of networking applications is on standards. At present, mainstream security manufacturers are acting as agents to promote the standardization process of the security industry. The more mainstream standards in China are ONVIF and the national standard GB/T28181.

ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum): An international open network video product standard network interface development forum jointly established by Axis, Bosch and Sony, named ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum). In November 2008, the forum officially released the first version of ONVIF specification. The latest version is ONVIF 2.2. The ONVIF standard mainly defines the connection interface between the front-end network camera and the back-end management platform and storage device. More than 80% of IP surveillance products in the world have achieved support for the ONVIF standard.

Technical requirements for information transmission, exchange and control of security video surveillance network systems (GB/T28181): A national standard developed by the Ministry of Public Security Institute, TC100 and industry-leading manufacturers. It defines two standards: management platform cascading and interconnection. It was released and promoted at the end of 2011. It mainly requires different video surveillance management platforms to be networked based on a unified standard. It meets the actual needs of domestic hospital monitoring networking.

Hospitals are gradually embarking on the road of comprehensive security

In the past 10 years, the focus of hospital security construction has shifted to building industry applications on advanced basic platforms. The current construction of security monitoring systems is often a simple stacking of security subsystems such as perimeter protection systems, active/passive alarm systems, access control systems, intercom systems, and monitoring subsystems such as video monitoring systems and intelligent image analysis systems. The most primitive manual analysis is used to link the security events/emergencies reported by the security system with the on-site images of the monitoring system. The labor intensity of monitoring personnel is high and the work efficiency is low. In modern smart hospitals, an excellent security system, although composed of several relatively independent subsystems, should never be a simple superposition of various subsystems, but should be integrated under the unified architecture of the security system, integrated and linked to each other, and become an organic part of the whole. Such a comprehensive management platform for security systems is a large security platform.

The first stage of building a large security platform is management. Among the multiple subsystems such as monitoring, access control, alarm, and patrol, the alarm and patrol systems usually have a universal output interface, which can be integrated through the switch network management; the monitoring system is large in scale, but if a platform-level SDK can be provided, it is not difficult to develop; but the access control system was mainly used in the military in the early days, with a very high level of confidentiality, and usually does not open interfaces to the outside world, and can only provide query services, so it has become the main difficulty in security integration. This is why many security platform manufacturers are access control hardware manufacturers. The next stage of building a large security platform is linkage. Flexibly allocate the resources of each system, achieve mutual coordination, and discover on-site problems as early as possible to avoid accidents. Linkage is not only a technical implementation, but more importantly, a management implementation.

High-end technology, integration first

In the medical industry, the rapid innovation of security technology not only includes hot spots such as high-definition, networking, and large security platforms, but also intelligence, integration, NVR, panoramic monitoring, intelligent retrieval, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things are also rapidly popularizing. The application of various new technologies can improve the usability, scalability, and reliability of security systems. There is no absolute distinction between the advantages and disadvantages of various technologies. The core point is to meet the basic requirements of security system construction: pre-prevention, emergency response during the event, and post-event playback.

Security & Protection System (SPS) is an intrusion alarm system, video security monitoring system, access control system, etc. composed of security products and other related products for the purpose of maintaining public safety; or an electronic system or network composed of these systems as subsystems or integration.