Airports

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airport

Airports require video surveillance for multiple wide-area and high traffic situations, including roadway and parking facilities, terminal and check-in monitoring, Transportation Security Agency checkpoints, perimeter protection, and runway safety and tarmac operations. While airport security has greatly improved over the last several years, there is still much more that can be done to ensure the safety of air travelers around the globe.

When a security concern arises at an airport, the security, law enforcement and TSA officials have little time to resolve the matter. The Pixel Video Fusion™ system toolset gets the right image information to all necessary responders immediately, thereby allowing a more informed decision and quicker action.

Key Factors for Decision Makers

Resolve issues quickly - Even a short disruption in air traffic flow can create havoc throughout the nation’s transportation system. If an issue cannot be resolved immediately and an airport shuts down operations even briefly, the resulting cost can easily be millions of dollars to airlines and travelers.

Maintain a safe and controlled environment - Experience dictates that gaps in airport security can lead to devastating consequences. Filling the gaps requires the right technology in the right places.

The Challenges

Wide area of coverage - Due to their nature, airports and airport grounds cover a very large area. This makes it difficult to achieve full video coverage, and impossible for security personnel to effectively monitor the entire environment in real time. PTZ solutions attempt to address the problem of achieving full video coverage but fall short when it is necessary to see what happened one minute ago or one day ago.

Security checkpoints - The primary point for ensuring airport security is at the airport checkpoint. Thousands of individuals pass through these checkpoints each day. It is extremely challenging to make sure that everyone is following the rules all of the time. When there is suspicion that something isn’t, security personnel need a means to quickly assess what happened and contain the issue before it becomes necessary to shut down airport operations. This often means going back to high-resolution video from seconds or minutes prior to the discovery of the event.

The Solution

The Pixel Video Fusion™ system provides the only effective means of achieving full video coverage in this demanding wide-area environment. Pixel has leveraged the 2MP 1920x1080 HDTV standards along with proprietary bandwidth reduction techniques to provide a cost-effective solution that provides full video coverage of wide areas without taxing network bandwidth. By recording all high-resolution data all of the time, it becomes practical to overcome the challenges associated with PTZ solutions and get detail on events that occurred in the past.

The tools Pixel Velocity has developed for managing video data make it practical and intuitive to quickly assess activities that have occurred with sufficient detail to make decisions. Within seconds, security personnel can assess a situation and make decisions to contain the issue and avoid shutting down airport operations.

Example – One of the largest airports in the United States

Airport officials saw an opportunity to achieve much better control and awareness of their checkpoint facilities with the Pixel Video Fusion™ system. By clustering cameras to provide seamless checkpoint lane views, all security stakeholders, including TSA, city police, and airport security, could view activity from multiple angles without losing sight of any action or individual. This provided immediate and concrete evidence in tracking individuals who breach the checkpoint and for resolving customer disputes. Delays between action and resolution were eliminated. Also critical to the airport was the need to share the city-services network. With the Pixel Video Fusion™ system, the shared network resulted in less than a 10% increase in network bandwidth consumption.