Uruguay Football Stadiums Project

Wavestore’s contribution to the effectiveness of video surveillance systems at three of the largest football stadiums in Montevideo, Uruguay, has been recognised by an award from the Asociación Latinoamericana de Seguridad (ALAS). The Best Latin American Private Security Project award was won jointly by Wavestore, the British manufacturer of open ­platform video management solutions, and its partners in the project, DDBA, a leading security and IT infrastructure systems integrator in Uruguay and Herta, a provider of state of the art facial recognition software.

Success
Presented during the ALAS 2018 Conference and Exhibition which took place in Miami on 25–26th July, the award was won against stiff competition from the participants in scores of other Latin American security projects entered for the awards’ ‘Private’ security project category.
“We were proud to have been entrusted to be at the heart of this mission critical project and we are now equally proud to be part of the team which has won this prestigious award,” said Chris Williams, Strategic Projects Director of Wavestore Global, said: “As a manufacturer based in the UK, we welcome the opportunity to support highly professional system integrators such as DDBA and to work closely with technology partners to exceed and not just meet, end-user clients’ expectations.”

The Project
Anti-social behaviour at sporting events is a common problem in countries worldwide and Uruguay is no exception. In recent years the country has experienced numerous episodes of serious crowd trouble at football matches.
With a zero-tolerance policy towards hooliganism, the Football Association of Uruguay, encouraged by the Ministry of Interior, made the decision to invest in technology which would recognise the relatively small number of individuals who could endanger and spoil the enjoyment of many thousands of people attending the games. The Association had three key objectives:

• Prevent known troublemakers from entering three of the largest football stadiums in Montevideo.
• Capture high quality images which can be used as evidence to prosecute offenders involved in acts of violence or improper behaviour.
• Decrease the number of police officers required to cover the football matches. As many as 1,000 have previously had to be deployed for high risk matches.

A number of different technologies were considered in order to achieve these objectives. Facial identification technology was chosen as the preferred solution as it would be non-invasive and could handle a flow of people.
The project, which has seen Wavestore installed within the Centenario, Penarol and Nacional stadiums’ control rooms as well as in mobile police units, was won following an extensive evaluation process in which Wavestore and technology partner, Herta, proved to be highly effective compared to those offered by other manufacturers.

Cameras and Recorders
Multiple Axis 20 Megapixel IP cameras have been installed within the three stadiums in order to monitor seating and terrace areas, whilst high definition Axis Q6055 32x PTZ cameras are being used by operators to zoom in to see close up detail of any incidents. In addition, Axis P1365 IP cameras chosen specifically to support facial recognition, have been installed at all entrances to each stadium, as well as in police mobile units located to monitor the streams of fans as they progress towards the stadium along the footpaths.
The stadiums and the Ministry of Interior have been equipped with Wavestore X-Series recorders plus additional servers maintained on standby for failover purposes. All are 4U rack-mounted with 24 hot-swap hard drives.
Copying all the data to the Ministry of Interior enables archived video to be retrieved at any time in the future and forensic review to be carried out to identify previously unknown offenders and others suspected of being involved in criminal activity.

Video Display Wall
Datapath VSN video wall controller systems, which have been integrated with Wavestore’s video management software (VMS) deployed at the three stadiums, facilitate the display of live and recorded images captured by operator selected cameras on large control room video walls.

Bandwidth
A carefully and detailed analysis of the network needed to support the aggregated bandwidth of all the cameras operating concurrently, as well as user demands at the various monitoring stations and display walls was carried out. According to German Ruiz of DDBA, it is one of the many reasons why Wavestore’s high-throughput servers were chosen for the project. “The client was also impressed by Wavestore’s robust data recording technology, which is extremely fast and enables specific video data to be located and displayed instantaneously,” said German. “Exporting video clips from the Wavestore system is also very quick and easy, requiring just a 3-click process.”