Howth, originally a small fishing village, has nowadays become a busy suburb of Dublin in Ireland. Over 2,000 yachts dock at Howth harbour every year for regattas and sea voyages. To ensure visitors’ safety and prevent damages to the luxurious yachts, harbour authority turned to Osmosis Ireland Ltd. for the depolyment of a surveillance solution. After surveying the harbour, Osmosis recommended using 5 megapixel and 10 megapixel IP cameras to monitor the vast areas around the harbour. For a big harbour like Howth, it would take hundreds of traditional analog cameras to cover the entire area. Only 20 cameras are required, now that 5MP and 10MP IP cameras were installed.

Following the recommendations of Osmosis, Howth harbour authority chose to install the IP cameras at strategic locations. However, the IP camera manufacturer had difficulties providing software to manage such a big quantity of high resolution IP cameras. Standalone NVR, with limited features, could only support 1 to 3 units of 5MP IP cameras and most could not even support 10MP cameras. Osmosis then chose the PC-based Geovision NVR fort he project. Each Geovision NVR system can support nine 5MP cameras and one 10MP camera, so only 2 NVR systems were required for the installation.

The Geovision NVR can be installed on a 64-bit Windows operating system, which means Windows can use up to 4GB of RAM. This significantly increases the number of high megapixel cameras that can be connected to one NVR system. Furthermore, Geovision NVR supports compression with H.264 codec, to record the video streams from the cameras. Compared to MPEG4 and MJPEG compression, H.264 codec saves 20 - 70% of hard drive space and lowers the internet bandwidth requirement for remote applications.

Phase 1 of the Howth harbour project is now complete. So far, Osmosis installed 10 IP cameras at strategic points around the harbour and connected the cameras to a Geovision NVR system. Phase 2 of the installation is set to begin immediately. [www.geovision.com.tw]