The eyes have it

Responding to an intruder alarm only to find it is a false alarm is costly, time-consuming and annoying. In 2005 there were more than 368,000 unwarranted alarms in the UK, according to the British Security Industry Federation.

In an attempt to make these a thing of the past,

division has developed the Eyetec system.

It is the first motion detector to combine passive infrared (PIR) with optical detection, rather than traditional motion detectors that use PIR with microwave sensors.

Philipp Angst of Siemens in

said: 'Microwave and PIR generate signals that have to be interpreted and only give general information about the incident. Eyetec captures a photo sequence, providing more information on the situation. This gives an unrivalled detection and false alarm rate.'

Sophisticated image processing algorithms track patterns in the motion and evaluate them to determine whether they represent a security threat. In normal operation, Eyetec records images at regular, user-definable intervals that are overwritten when nothing untoward happens. When an event occurs that matches risk conditions, pictures are stored from before, during and after the moment the alarm is triggered.