Bosch Addresses Situational Awareness in Airport Video Surveillance

Airports are complex environments with perimeters, parking structures, terminals, aprons, airfields, shops and restaurants. Each airport zone faces its own particular set of surveillance challenges. Solutions need to be tailored to a multitude of security risks including bomb threats, sabotage and the hijacking of aircraft as well as commercial risks such as theft, vandalism and harassment. Airport surveillance must also be configured so that operations are monitored both inside as well as outside the building and ensure the safe flow of passengers throughout, under all environmental and lighting conditions.

Every airport has large open areas such as at check-in, the luggage drop-off, the security check and border control. Crowds of people enter, queue and leave here so it is important to monitor their flow and to constantly check the overall situation. In such environments, Bosch panoramic cameras with 180° and 360° lenses can offer full situational awareness without any blind spots.

The company‘s 4K ultra HD cameras with very high resolution can provide a detailed overview of a large area or monitor a large crowd. Combining high quality resolution with the ability to set certain areas of interest, it is possible to focus attention on one or several regions while maintaining the complete overview. Such functions are essential for identification purposes and to ensure that suspicious individuals can be tracked in a crowd. When combined with a telephoto lens, the 4K ultra HD cameras enable person identification at up to 130m and detection at up to 1,300m. Ultra HD also ensures effective retrospective analysis is possible in the event of a security incident.

Analytics at the Edge
In airport retail settings, shops and restaurants see huge volumes of people pass through their doors. This invariably comes with a higher risk of theft and security issues. Bosch Essential Video Analytics provides 15 video analytics algorithms that can be used for intrusion detection or to help to identify thieves. It can also be used to detect suspicious behavior on the shop floor. In addition to surveillance, the package can also provide several important business analytics benefits such as a combination of crowd density and movement information for the optimization of shop layout. In other applications, the combination of people counting and objects in field information can prove useful for the analysis of in-store promotions.

Environmental conditions pose some of the greatest challenges for airport surveillance. Some light condition changes are predictable (day/night), while others such as the headlights of a passing car or just scattered clouds are not. Bosch network cameras with built-in video analytics can detect changing lighting conditions and adapt settings in real time. Network cameras with Intelligent Video Analytics - such as the Dinion IP starlight 8000 MP - are specifically tailored to provide reliable video analytics with minimum false alarms under the most adverse circumstances. These cameras can easily detect the difference between rain or snow and an object of interest and thus greatly reduce the number of false alarms triggered by the environment.

Hot and Cold
Cameras at airports also need to be robust enough to withstand some of the harshest climatic conditions and to continually provide high quality images regardless of sub-zero temperatures, severe storms or extreme heat. With this in mind, the Bosch MIC IP camera family is specifically tailored to provide round-the-clock video analytics under the most adverse circumstances, including -40 °C to +60 °C temperatures, severe winds of up to 209 km/hour sustained and 100% humidity (acc. IP68 / NEMA 6P).