The Hsing Tian Kong Temple in Taipei, Taiwan, is devoted to Kuan Yu, the patron god of businessmen. The popular Taoist temple is relatively new in origin – it was constructed in 1967 – and is located on a street corner near the center of the country’s capital city, occupying more than 7,000 square meters (75,000 square feet). Sculptures of dragons adorn the Hsing Tian Kong Temple's ornate design, which has become a popular attraction in the city.

The temple's huge number of visitors suggested the need to enhance an existing analog video surveillance system installed at the large facility. Specifically, visitors to the temple tended to leave their handbags under the table as they prayed, and the bags were often stolen. The previous analog system provided insufficient image detail to identify the thieves. Given that the temple is a preserved cultural site, installation of the system had to be simple and as non-invasive as possible to preserve the building’s beautiful architectural design elements. Any enhancement of the existing video surveillance system also had to preserve the previous investment made in the analog video surveillance system.

To update video surveillance, the Hsing Tian Kong Temple turned to Alpha Pricing, a leading network surveillance solutions provider in Taipei that serves the government sector, institutions and businesses nationwide. Alpha Pricing created a centrally monitored system using Milestone's Xprotect Professional video management software. Other system components include a Longstor Storage Server, the EverFocus ECOR 264 (H.264-based) digital video recorder, and Edge-corE ES3528M and ES4308-PoE network switches. Power-over-Ethernet provides electricity to Arecont Vision's megapixel video cameras along the network without requiring a separate power connection, which simplified installation. The use of digital video encoders enabled the system to preserve the temple's previous investment in analog cameras, which are now tied into the networked system.

“Arecont Vision cameras are a great addition to boost the effectiveness of an IP-based system, and the cameras integrate easily with other system components while lowering overall system costs,” said Steven Chen, Vice President of Alpha Pricing. “The enhanced details of megapixel images are a big improvement over analog images, and details can be critical to some applications.”

Also used at the temple is the day/night version of Arecont Vision Model AV2105, a 2 megapixel H.264 IP camera that provides 24 frames-per-second of 1600x1200-pixel video. The 2 megapixel camera also incorporates MegaVideo® image processing and has features similar to the 5 megapixel model, including H.264 compression to minimize bandwidth and storage needs. [www.arecontvision.com]