Future Fibre Technologies has developed an Arabic version of its CAMS™ technology, giving security staff an intuitive and easy to understand graphical alarm interface in their local language.

Future Fibre Technologies manufactures fibre-optic perimeter intrusion detection and location systems. Its Arabic version delivers and works with the company’s patented alarm recognition and discrimination (ARaD) technology.

The technology enables FFT’s Secure Fence system to detect a fence climb, cut or lift – even when they occur during a natural event, such as a sand storm, thereby virtually eliminating the incidence of nuisance alarms.

The company’s current generation of fibre-optic-based fence mounted intrusion detection technologies have overcome the problem of nuisance alarms by using techniques such as digital signal processing, signature recognition and advanced learning algorithms. This technology uses very highly sophisticated levels of signal processing, which maintains full system sensitivity during all weather conditions, thus avoiding nuisance alarms.

Known as Secure Fence, the Future Fibre Technologies system can pinpoint the location of intrusions to better than 25m anywhere along the fence and requires no power or electronics, making it ideal for remote borders in hostile environments.

According to Alec Owen, FFT’s international client manager, the Secure Fence system overcomes the many problems facing security providers responsible for safeguarding open land borders and infrastructure.

“The illegal infiltration of individuals and smuggling of goods and weapons across borders is a continuing problem in the Middle East,” Owen says, “and the region’s high proportion of critical petrochemical infrastructures exacerbates the challenges facing suppliers and operators responsible for protecting these facilities.”

Owen says that the only line of defence used for country borders is often a perimeter fence which, while succeeding to delay or deter intrusions, is largely ineffective in protecting borders.

“A perimeter fence of more than a few kilometers long provides many areas where intruders can cross completely undetected,” he says.

“In the past, CCTV cameras employing video motion detection (VMD) technology held great promise, but experience has shown that they have been prone to nuisance alarms,” he says.

“Traditional fence mounted intrusion detection sensors have also proved less than ideal solutions, as they require power and electronics to be deployed every few hundred metres along a border, which is expensive and often impractical,” Owen says. “In addition, their extremely basic processing power means they typically trade off detection sensitivity to reduce nuisance alarms, ultimately undermining the very security these systems were originally intended to provide.

Future Fibre Technologies’ Secure Fence overcomes these problems. Secure Fence is a fine cable, which is easily installed on a wide variety of fence types, including chain mesh, weld mesh and palisade, to deliver superior sensitivity without the penalty of nuisance alarms. It is immune to lightning, EMI, RFI, is intrinsically safe and requires no electronics, power or maintenance in the field.

Owen concludes: “The ideal border or perimeter protection solution is a fence mounted fibre optic detection system, linking back to the main security centre and ideally interfacing to CCTV cameras to provide visual confirmation to staff so they can determine the exact nature of the intrusion or threat that they face.”

It’s this type of configuration that the company has already installed at six sites in the GCC.