AV Case Study: CCTV Audio for Police Custodial Space
A police station in Perth transforms its CCTV audio with Biamp Tesira AEC.
29 April 2025
It’s a place where audio goes to die. The custodial desk and holding cells of a Police Station in urban Perth. Concrete, reinforced glass and steel prevail. CCTV is everywhere, for the protection of the police officers and all those going through the system. There are plenty of microphones as well. After all, hearing a comment, an admission or a confession, and having that audio properly heard in the moment and recorded for later inspection could prove crucial for any number of reasons.
And here’s the point: CCTV systems have improved out of sight over recent years. What with 4K becoming the norm, along with detailed video in any lighting conditions and more responsive PTZ capabilities with intelligent camera tracking, there’s nowhere to hide. But often, audio has dragged its heels. In an environment like this custodial area, speech intelligibility is terrible. The acoustics are harsh and the background noise is often extreme.
This is the situation Integrate Perth stepped into. The business had already installed an audio system in the station with Biamp Tesira as the nerve centre. But the stroke of genius was to replace one of the cards in Tesira with an AEC card.
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In an environment like this custodial area, speech intelligibility is terrible. The acoustics are harsh and the background noise is often extreme
Integrate Perth’s Sales Director Andrew Anderson-King explains: “In our initial tests we simply ran some CCTV footage with associated audio through Tesira’s AEC processing and had a listen on a little powered speaker. Our jaws dropped. Environmental noise, such as holding cell doors slamming or yelling in the background, along with the harsh reverberation of the space, had all but disappeared. What was left was intelligible spoken word. We instantly knew we were onto something.”
There are something like 100 microphones across the police station. And now, the captured hi-res pristine CCTV video has corresponding audio processed by Tesira’s AEC which is usefully intelligible and its utility has increased no end.
“It’s a big leap forward,” confirms Andrew Anderson-King. “The Tesira AEC improves everyone’s safety and is now useful for staff training. I can see other applications where mission-critical audio is important but the acoustic conditions are hostile, for example, customs and border force could benefit, as could warehousing, and the port authority. They could all benefit from Tesira AEC cleaning up recorded speech.”
Integrate Perth: integrateperth.com.au
Biamp: biamp.com
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