Local camera network for surveillance in Newcastle Airport

Public transport operators are facing an increasing demand in efficiency and security from the general public as well as from the government. An important part of the efforts deployed to meet these demands is the ever-increasing use of video surveillance cameras throughout the network, in order to monitor the flow of passengers, enable the staff to be informed of possible congestion, and detect incidents without delay. A major inconvenience of this approach, however, is the very large number of cameras required to effectively monitor even a comparatively small network. Added to the cost of the cameras themselves, the cost and complexity of the required wiring, plus the sheer impossibility to watch all the images at the same time, make such a system growingly ineffective as the number of cameras increases. In the recent years, image-processing solutions have been found to automatically detect incidents and make measurements on the video images issued from the cameras, relieving the staff in the control room of much of the hassle to find out where interesting events are happening. However, the need remains to bring the latter to a centralised computer located in a technical room, which leaves the need to place huge lengths of video cabling, increasing the cost, the complexity, and decreasing the adaptability of the video system. In the framework of the EU's PRISMATICA programme, INRETS has devised and tested in a real-life situation an architecture to address these problems. The general idea is to avoid sending many full-resolution, real-time images at the same time to the video processor, by deporting the processing power close to the cameras themselves, and sending only the meaningful images through the general network to the control room. Until recently, computers and video grabbers were much too expensive to even dream of having multiple computers spread all over the network. But costs are decreasing at a steady pace, and it is becoming realistic to believe that such a thing will be commonplace soon. Existing technologies already allow, although still at a cost, to realise such a working network. (6 pages)