Digital Surveillance Instrument - The CCTV

Surveillance is the art of keeping an eye on the behaviour of certain people or thing. The performance of this art is dependent on various types of digital instruments. Surveillance without the help of digital instruments is a very difficult task and requires huge man power which becomes cost inefficient. Thus to make surveillance efficient and cost effective digitised surveillance instruments are used such.

One of the most common and the widely used instruments is the CCTV i.e. the Close Circuit Televisions. In such an instrument cameras are deployed at the places where the surveillance is to be carried out and the camera sends the pictures of the area being watched over to the control room. In the control room a small television is set up which receives the pictures from various such cameras and displays it in rotation on its monitor. Thus with CCTV a single person can keep an eye over various places at the same moment which would have been impossible without the CCTV. The CCTV is an important tool to deter the crime. In UK almost all the cities and towns have CCTV installed which are linked to the police control rooms.

An interesting feature about CCTV is that although this setup for surveillance is not very expensive but it becomes expensive when every painting in an art gallery is to be watched over. So the dummy cameras are put up in such galleries to scare the visitors who think that they are being watched over.

The CCTV is the most common and widely used digital surveillance instrument. It is used right from any grocery shop to the White House. Although CCTV have been criticised saying that they break the privacy of the people at public or private places but still they are indispensable to our society. It is because of these instruments that we are able to live peacefully.