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Avigilon enters market with 11

Avigilon enters market with 11

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--Any number of companies will debut new gadgets at ASIS International 2006 in San Diego, but new surveillance manufacturer Avigilon is looking to make a splash with a system that touts 11 megapixels of resolution. The company's president and chief executive officer Alexander Fernandes isn't shy: "What's special about this system is that it sees better and it records better than any other product." He said the company has been in "stealth mode" for the past two years, developing its product and beta testing, but is ready at ASIS to begin commercial application. "We want to sell through a network of resellers and integrators," Fernandes said. "Our product is a high-end product, so we're going to be fairly selective as to who we sign on. We won't be distributed like a commodity." He wouldn't discuss any of the beta sites other than to say, "they're high-risk areas, some marinas, some high-risk infrastructure buildings." To get this 11-megapixel image, the company redesigned security surveillance from scratch, said Fernandes, who has a background in imaging with digital off-set printer Creo (acquired by Kodak) and machine vision manufacturer Quantitative Imaging. He was helped by Avigilon director of security solutions JP Forest, whose background is in forensics. With current technology, when Forest was on the stand testifying about video images, he would run into problems establishing the accuracy of data, he said. Because of compression technology necessary to move and store video images, Forest would often have to admit right off the bat that the images had been adulterated, "So how do you know what you're seeing is what actually happened?" Thus, using gigabit Ethernet transmission, and proprietary storage, Avigilon transmits its images with only minimal lossless compression. Rather than use a watermark to verify authenticity, the company developed an algorithm that creates a digital signature for each video image that won't correlate if even one pixel has been altered.

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