Jason Ford

Mobile checkpoint provides full-HD imagery from underside of vehicles

News

In just under a year UK engineers have designed and produced V-Guard, a new security tool that gives users high-definition images from the underside of vehicles.

Designed for permanent or temporary deployment, the V-Guard mobile checkpoint comes with a fully integrated license plate recognition package and optional day/night IR overview camera to help identify vehicles and their occupants.

“We spotted a gap in the market for a product that is highly portable, could fit into something the size of a briefcase, that can be put on the ground very quickly and is very simple to operate - including the graphical user interface (GUI) - and is ruggedized,” said Andy Johnson, project manager at CMCA (UK), the company that started work on V-Guard in December 2014.

The system, which can be battery or mains operated, is connected to a tablet via secure wireless or 3G link but can be used with any wireless Windows-based device in order to display - and allow interaction with - information generated by the system.

“So that can be a ruggedized tablet, a laptop or it could be hard-wired across to any other computer system, so a desktop computer in an office or security station,” said Johnson. “The information we’re feeding into the GUI is drawn from the cameras, so the under vehicle camera does the 1080p HD [full HD] and that’s gathered as the vehicle drives over the system.”

V-Guard’s road surface-mounted, 360o HD camera is housed inside strengthened semi-transparent resin along with an LED control system.

“Its visual, there’s no active intelligence,” said Johnson, “there’s no x-ray type backscatter, it’s a visual only system.”

“We don’t have a stitched image because we’re using a semi fish eye,” he added.  “We looked at our initial stitching and thought: let’s concentrate on the video imagery, lets make that completely controllable so that we can cycle through the frames – forward and backwards – with the swipe of a finger over the GUI, which means we get the parallax associated with the image so that we can look into spaces from multiple angles rather than having a flat image and trying to enhance it.”

CMCA (UK) took V-Guard to DSEI 2015 in September and the company says strong interest in the system has been received from Middle Eastern countries. The company will now exhibit V-Guard at the upcoming Transport Security Expo at Olympia in London on 2nd – 3rd December.