Axis Communications: video surveillance for traffic control at Town Hall

Axis Communications: video surveillance for traffic control at Town Hall. The municipal council of A Coruña occupies an area of 36.8 km2 and is the second city of the Autonomous Community of Galicia as far as the size of its urban area is concerned. The growth of the urban area has been accompanied by a gradual increase in its population in the past three decades, which presently numbers close to 250,000 inhabitants. This situation has led to residential decentralization, which has involved the extension of the city limits. This decentralization has been accompanied by the development of new infrastructure, improvements in access and urban renewal.

One of the above-mentioned infrastructure projects is the centralized traffic control system inaugurated in 1993 and located in the bus station of A Coruña. Consisting of a total of 26 analogue cameras distributed at strategic locations, the main function of this system is to control and manage traffic, thus preventing congestion in a city where the number of vehicles has increased considerably.

The facility needed to be updated in order to make it compatible with the digital video monitoring systems of the 21st century. On the other hand, this facility must meet the requirement of safeguarding the privacy of residents living in areas close to the location of the cameras, meaning that these cameras will sometimes have to limit their field of vision, including “blind spots”, in order to record only events related to traffic.

Juan Antonio López, Technical Engineer for Public Worksstated: “In an ever-expanding city with an increasing number of vehicles, the mission we face is to update our traffic control system and prepare it for the future, making it more flexible and versatile, and allowing the simple incorporation of new cameras to provide services in recently constructed zones”.

The Solution: An IP Solution

Various solutions were proposed by the Town Hall, although, since a fiber-optic network is being installed, a system is being sought that will make it possible to integrate the cameras and video surveillance system into an IP network. “Iterdata Network”, a company specializing in research and development of information systems, has proposed to the Town Hall the setup of a demonstration facility to allow the advantages provided by IP technology to be tested in situ.

The basic system proposed by Iterdata Network consists of Axis Communications cameras and “Ofisec PRO” software from TOC Systems, a versatile professional management tool for complex video infrastructure. In a previous experiment, an IP camera of the Domo type was installed over a viaduct at a height of 150 m above ground level, for the purpose of monitoring the junction linking the “A Grela” business park to the fire station. This is an area characterized by a high level of heavyduty vehicular traffic. Given the complexity imposed by the height at which the IP camera is located, communication with the Control Center occurs via Wi-Fi, which leads to some doubts as it is considered possible that there may be security holes that will allow unauthorized users to gain access to the images.

This possibility is considered to be a concern, as a result of which a reduction was made in the projection cone of the antenna as a main solution, thus turning the actions of possible hackers into a tedious and unproductive task.

High Image Quality and No Restrictions for Expanding the System

The first thing the officials from the Town Hall of A Coruña noticed was the evident increase in the image quality offered by the IP cameras. Likewise, the greater use of the fiber-optic network that now links the municipal network with its counterpart in Traffic was evaluated positively, which greatly increased the radius of activity of the facility and made it possible to overcome the problem of scalability caused by usage limitations of analogue cameras.

Now it is a simple matter to relocate or incorporate new cameras into the system when necessary, without relying on switching arrays. The application of the Quality of Service feature of the IP networks also allows them to reserve bandwidth for video, so that the flow of images is not affected by the utilization of other network applications.

The possibility of not needing to depend only on the Control Center for viewing of video images was also considered a positive asset, as it is now possible to access the system remotely via devices such as PDAs or mobile phones, as well as to having the possibility of using an alarm notification system to provide warnings about anomalous situations.

The ability to include zone masks in private locations, thanks to the Ofisec PRO software from TOC Systems, enables the safeguarding of civil liberties, thus rendering it impossible to compromise residents’ privacy.

The multiple benefits of this software also include the option of configuring multiple preset positions for automatic night patrols; these options were very highly valued by the customer.

Contact:

Dominic Bruning
Axis Communications,
Preston, United Kingdom
Tel.: +44 870 1620 047
Fax: +44 870 7778 620
dominic.bruning@axis.com
www.axis.com