Someone inside the fence

The inside of an urban substation, fence intact and gate shut. Someone is walking across the gravel, between the transformer and the control house. Nothing has been climbed in this picture: they’re already in. And that’s the whole case. Nobody should ever be in here, so to know something is wrong you only have to count to one.

CAM-187 · SUBSTATION YARD · PERSON INSIDE

What IRIS understands

What it recognizes in this scene

person inside the compound
power transformer
control house
perimeter fence
yard switchgear

What this camera measures

An alert says something’s happening. The reading says how much.

3 minInside the compound for
1People inside the compound
0People authorized right now
0Access points standing open
0Vehicles inside the compound
14:07Time of the alert

The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client’s measurement.

The rule

You decide once. IRIS applies it always.

there is a person inside the fence and no maintenance window is open

Then

alert the control room with the camera, the time and the video of the moment
check in the control room whether any work was booked at this site
keep the sequence from the moment the person enters the frame

The instruction that set it up«Tell me if there is anybody inside the fence, at any hour. That is the whole rule.»

What changes

What changes for whoever answers for the site

Four thirty in the afternoon and someone is walking across the gravel, between the transformer and the control hut. Nothing has been tripped: they’re already inside, and all around them there’s enough voltage to kill them. This is the camera that explains the product best on this whole site, and it does so by what it lacks. On a platform you have to decide how many people are too many, and that takes weeks to tune. Here there’s nothing to decide: one person inside the fence is already the incident. The rule is written in one sentence, the operator on duty gets it first time, and it works on day one. Not because the camera sees better: because the question is far simpler.

What people usually ask

What if it’s a technician who is supposed to be there?

IRIS doesn’t know whether that person is entitled to be there, and it won’t pretend otherwise. What it does is report that somebody is inside; the one who knows whether work was booked is the control room. If the site sets a maintenance window, nothing is raised inside that window. Outside it, the alert always goes out, and whoever gets it closes it in two seconds by looking at the picture.

Does IRIS recognize the person who is inside?

No. IRIS does not identify anyone: it does not recognize faces, it does not read license plates, it does not compare against any database and it does not store who anyone is. It detects a situation — there’s a person in a compound that’s meant to be empty — not a person.

Do you have to draw zones inside the compound?

You don’t need to. At other sites you carve out a sensitive area inside a place full of people; here the area is the whole compound, because the whole compound is empty. You draw the inside of the fence once and that’s it: no time bands to tune, no threshold for how many people are too many, because the threshold is one.

Other cameras