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Solutions by typeIntrusion detection

How long has that hole been in the fence?

The fence stopped being a fence

It’s 6:20 p.m. in the scrapyard. At a point in the mesh where there’s no gate, the fence has been cut from top to bottom and folded back like a curtain. A person comes out through the gap, crouching. Another follows, a coil of cable over one shoulder. The last perimeter round walked past there on Thursday and the cut wasn’t there. That’s five days.

12 cameras across 8 sectors

This is how you ask for it

«Tell me if the fence stops looking the way it did — a panel cut, folded or flattened — and tell me as well if anyone crosses at that point.»

The hole isn’t found the day it appears. It’s found on the next round, or the day the inventory doesn’t add up. Weeks pass between the two, and material has been leaving through that gap every night. When it’s finally repaired, nobody can say when it opened or how much went out through it, because the video of those weeks has already been recorded over.

You decide once

You decide this once. You mark which stretches of fence are really perimeter, how often you want them compared with the day before, and who’s told when one changes shape. IRIS goes over them every morning, in every camera that sees fence, without anyone having to walk the perimeter. If works start and that stretch is taken down on purpose, you change the rule and put it back when they finish.

A fence is the cheapest security measure there is and the one nobody looks at. It gets checked by walking it: once a week, once a month, the day somebody remembers. The rest of the time it is assumed to be fine. And cut mesh, from sixty feet away, still looks like mesh.

The hole isn’t the end of anything. It’s a door that only a few people know about. Scrap leaves through it at night, anyone can come in through it, and in a substation or a robot cell it lets in somebody who has no idea what is live inside. The bill arrives in two shapes: material that isn’t there when it’s counted, or an accident on your site involving someone who doesn’t work for you.

And a fence isn’t the same fence everywhere. In a scrapyard, the cut is a door through which material leaves every night and the inventory count fails three months later. In a substation, it’s a breach through which somebody walks in with no idea what is live inside. In the wall of a prison block, a hole blown from top to bottom with the reinforcement showing isn’t a stock matter: it’s a matter for that night, and the round is at eleven. On an urban jobsite, a panel flattened by the wind leaves the plot open to the street with the machinery inside. And on the fence of a chemical compound, the open leaf is the way to the tanks. The same detection; five different urgencies.

IRIS looks at the fence as an object, not as background. It compares today’s panel with yesterday’s, and when one turns up cut, folded or flattened it says so, with camera, hour, video and the before and after. And when someone crosses at a point that isn’t a gate, it says that too. Not on the night round: while it’s happening.

What changes

Before, the state of the fence was whatever the last round said: a sheet signed on Thursday that held until the following Thursday. Now the whole perimeter is reviewed every morning from the cameras that are already there, and the stretch that changed comes out on its own, with the earlier picture beside it. The maintenance crew doesn’t go out to find the hole. They go out to close it, and they know which post it is at.

Where we have seen it

  • Six thirty in the morning at the departures curb. Three lanes and none of them moving: cars double-parked, a taxi across the middle, an SUV with its trunk open taking out cases and a line waiting for a gap. The shuttle is in its bay and people are boarding with big luggage. Along the sidewalk a steady stream walks toward the doors. IRIS counts the vehicles entering the drop-off lane, measures how long each one stays and how much curb is left free. It reads no license plate here and doesn’t know who is driving: it counts vehicles and measures minutes.

    CAM-580The curb jams before the terminal does

    «Tell me if a car has been stopped in the drop-off lane for more than ten minutes and others are waiting for a gap.»

    See this camera →Airports

  • Mid-afternoon in the bottling hall. There’s no alarm: the machine tower is green and the line is still running. But on the belt the bottles don’t come one after another. They come in bursts: a tight group, a long stretch of empty blue belt, another group. An operator stands beside the conveyor doing nothing, waiting for them to come back. IRIS counts the bottles crossing a fixed point and times every gap.

    CAM-241The line is running, but a gap opens every few seconds

    «Count the bottles going past here every minute and tell me if a gap of more than ten seconds opens up.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • The fenced compound with the storage tanks and the dosing room. Someone is pushing one of the chain-link gate leaves open with both hands. Inside you can see the vertical tanks, the bunded area with its yellow grating, and the green door of the room, open, with an operator walking out of it. To the left, the plant’s basins and pipework.

    CAM-154Someone opens the chemical compound gate

    «Tell me if anyone opens the chemical compound gate in a time band with no work scheduled there.»

    See this camera →Critical infrastructure

  • A blue car works its way down the aisle with its brake lights on and takes the right-hand turn, following the arrow painted on the floor. On both sides every space is taken. Further down, another car brakes looking for the same thing. IRIS starts a clock when a vehicle comes onto the level and stops it when it parks. It follows the car by its image, inside the frame; it doesn’t read the plate.

    CAM-461Four minutes circling and not one free space

    «Tell me how long it takes a driver to park on this level on average, by time of day.»

    See this camera →Parking lots

  • The wing seen from above. On the ground floor there’s a hole in the wall: a run of masonry blown out from top to bottom, the mesh inside bent and exposed, and rubble and dust spread across the floor. An officer is standing in front of the gap. Around it the wing carries on: the fixed tables with their stools, the upper tier with people leaning on the rail, and the cells open on both sides.

    CAM-116A hole in the wing wall

    «Tell me when damage appears on a wall, a grille or a mesh fence in this area, and tell me while it is happening, not on the night round.»

    See this camera →The prison

  • Mid-afternoon in the scrap yard. At a point in the fence where there’s no gate, the mesh has been cut and bent back. Someone is coming out through that gap, crouching; another walks with a coil of cable toward a van parked outside the site, rear doors open and more coils inside. At the back, the copper bay and the forklift carry on working. IRIS sees the perimeter crossed where there’s no way through, and material leaving on a route that doesn’t exist.

    CAM-428The fence has been cut and material is leaving through it

    «Alert me if anyone crosses the fence at a point that is not a gate, or if material leaves the yard by a route that is not the exit.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • Small hours in the arc furnace hall. The shell has opened at one point: a glowing breach in the steel wall, with metal dripping out and running down the plate. Six people watch it from the floor. A slag pot waits on its car to the right. The thermal camera reads the heat of the surface it can see, the shell from the outside, and that patch had been growing for days in the very same frame.

    CAM-370A glowing breach in the furnace shell

    «Tell me if a hot spot shows up on the furnace shell, or if the usual patch has grown compared with the days before.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • Late afternoon. The mesh panel that closes the substation off from the street is flattened to the ground and bent inward, and one gate leaf has swung out. A person is stepping through the gap, one foot on the low wall and both hands on the frame. That’s the fact: the fence has changed shape, and somebody is going through where you can now go through.

    CAM-341The fence is down and someone is coming through the gap

    «Tell me if the fence or the gate stop being the way they were, and also if anyone goes through that spot.»

    See this camera →Industry

  • The plant’s product rack, both levels loaded: blue drums, jerrycans, totes and tubs. On the lower level there’s an empty bay, marked out with yellow and black stripes, with nothing in it. An operator in a safety vest has stopped to one side and is looking at it. In front, a pallet of stacked sacks on the concrete; behind, the plant building and the basins.

    CAM-155A drum missing from the rack

    «Show me the product rack every morning and tell me if anything is missing from its bay, without anyone having to go and count.»

    See this camera →Critical infrastructure

  • A workshop in mid-morning. On the wall, a board with every tool hanging in its own slot: wrenches in size order, screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, files, a saw and a level. Below it runs a bank of labeled drawers. An officer, seen from behind, is checking the board with the sheet in his hand, and three of the people held there are working at the wooden benches. In this picture every tool is present: none is missing, so there’s nothing to attend to and the point shows in gold.

    CAM-115The tool board in the workshop

    «Tell me if any tool is missing from the board when the workshop closes, and tell me which slot and since what time it has been empty.»

    See this camera →The prison

What it doesn’t do

IRIS does not know who cut the fence or why. It sees that the panel is no longer as it was, and it says so. Whether a backing up truck flattened it or somebody cut it with an angle grinder is for the person who goes to look.

And it only sees the fence that falls inside a camera. A two-mile perimeter with four cameras has four watched stretches and a lot of dark ground. Before calling a site covered, you check which feet each camera actually sees.

And the review says that a panel has changed since yesterday, not the exact hour of the cut. If the minute matters, a camera has to have seen somebody go through there.

Questions

Do you need sensors or cable on the fence?
No. IRIS works from the images of the cameras that already look at the perimeter, so there’s no trenching, no cable to pull and nothing to hang on the mesh. That matters on long fences, where a perimeter detection system costs more than the fence itself. What’s needed is for the camera to see the panel in enough detail: if a stretch appears at two hundred yards and against the light, there’s nothing there to compare. It’s checked camera by camera before it counts as covered.
What if the fence breaks from wind or a truck?
It detects that just the same, and it tends to be the most used part. IRIS doesn’t care about the cause: it sees that a panel has changed shape or come down, and it says so. A storm that flattens a hundred feet of mesh is a breach in the perimeter exactly like a cut with an angle grinder, and on a windy night nobody’s going out to check. In the morning there is the list of stretches to look at, with the camera and the hour each one changed.
Does it alert at the time or the next day?
Both, and they aren’t the same tool. The fence review works by comparing today’s image with earlier days, and that result comes out once a day, like a report. The immediate alert is a different rule: if someone crosses the fence at a point that isn’t a gate, that arrives at the time, with the camera open. A cut made at four in the morning shows up in the morning report; the person going through it shows up while they’re going through.
Does IRIS identify whoever comes through the gap?
No. IRIS does not recognize faces and does not know who anyone is. It says there is a person crossing the fence at a point that isn’t a gate, in which camera and at what hour, and it keeps the video. Searching afterward for “who else has crossed at that point this week” works from what can be seen — what they were carrying, the direction they went, the time — never from the face. Putting a name to someone is a matter for people and a procedure, not for a camera.

See all the questions

Demo · IRIS at work

We won’t just tell you. We’ll show you.

It’s a summary of the real screen: it plays by itself, step by step, and shows only the path of one case. The actual tool has far more than fits in here.

  1. The alert fires
  2. It lands in the tray
  3. You open it
  4. You confirm or dismiss
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