Dutch security systems manufacturer The Pebble Group is planning to bring its new Crime Buster proactive security system to the market at the end of the year.
The system has been developed as a pre-emptive response to incident management, as opposed to the traditional reactive vision systems used to alert guards or police once an incident has already occurred.
Using the Crime Buster, businesses are able to protect their premises by detecting and intervening before a break-in has taken place. The system would see a static camera installed outside a premise or compound and incidents analysed and detected by the camera using Pebble Group’s proprietary algorithms.
When a likely break-in had been detected, an operator at a remote location would be alerted and would be able to intervene via the Crime Buster unit to de-escalate the situation via video and audio streamed over an IP network.
Pascal Broers, business development manager at Pebble, said the development of the Crime Buster came from the fact some 96 per cent of alarm calls coming into call centres were false, placing a huge burden on an “inefficient system” and resulting in increasing follow-up times by guards and the police.
The issue of verifying a situation and allowing real-time remote intervention was identified as key to the development of the Crime Buster, to ensure customers could benefit from a practical and more efficient method of protecting their premises.
“We built a proactive security system that reliably detects trespassers outside the building and directs the Crime Buster unit to automatically track the target. Then the operator in the control room can intervene via audio,” said Broers.
“In the dead of night, when they don’t expect it and someone is speaking to them at 100 decibels, they will be startled and they are going to leave.”
The Crime Buster uses the highly-sensitive Sony FCB-EX985E/P high-resolution wide-angle camera with 28x zoom and rapid focus speed as its camera component, together with integrated infrared illumination and audio in the unit for remote intervention. Broers highlighted the technology as a “massive asset” which allows operators to respond to a real-time critical situation.
The call centre operators are specially trained to de-escalate the situations caught on the Crime Buster as it requires different skills than normally utilised in an alarm call centre. The system will see more time spent on calls than traditionally and operators will have more time on each client to ensure they are better protected.
The Pebble Group has been running a pilot of the system in the financial district of Amsterdam and Broers claims the company is pointing towards an official launch of the Crime Buster at the end of 2013. Initially the focus is going to be on growing the brand throughout Europe but there are opportunities beyond the continent as the company looks to benefit from its “vast international network”.
