Critical Infrastructure

stadia

Stadiums, utilities, commercial and government facilities, as well as key urban locations and landmarks are important for both the nation’s security and the economy. These are challenging environments to secure and it is critical to deploy the right technology to provide the best possible information to the decision makers responsible for their safety and operation.

Key Factors for Decision Makers

Protect national assets - Critical infrastructure facilities are often targets of terrorist acts. From securing the safety of 100,000 people in a stadium, to ensuring the safety of our water supply, the responsibilities and potential consequences for decision makers are tremendous. With the right technology, we stand a much better chance to avoid devastating consequences.

Ensure safe and efficient operation - To keep people safe in these environments it is important that security personnel can quickly assess suspicious activities with sufficient detail to safely deploy resources to address potential problems. Additionally, operational efficiencies can be gained by monitoring activity in real time. Are crowds gathering at one entrance to a stadium while the others are nearly empty? Are event personnel in the best positions to help people find their way? Is the setup of the event conducive to efficient operation?

The Challenges

Wide area of coverage - By nature, critical infrastructure facilities typically 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.

Unmanned operation - Often it is the case that video is either not monitored on a real-time basis, or is monitored by too few security personnel who are likely to be fatigued and miss critical events. An effective security solution must address these scenarios.

The Solution

The Pixel Video Fusion™ system provides the only effective means of achieving full video coverage in this challenging 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.

To address the issue of unmanned operations, analytics are the hopes and dreams of the industry. However, their inability so far to deal with varying environmental conditions and false alarms often creates more work and confusion rather than less. While Pixel does provide an open architecture that can be integrated with analytic solutions, the key to effective operation in unmanned environments is to record all of the high-resolution data all of the time. This provides the capability to review events that have occurred or are occurring with sufficient detail to make good decisions and gather evidence.

Example – University of Michigan Stadium

Department of Public Safety officials at the University of Michigan needed to increase security while expanding the largest football stadium in the world. They sought a solution they could use for multiple purposes and particularly for crowd-flow monitoring and surveillance during stadium construction. As sworn police officers, DPS personnel understood the challenges of trying to solve a case with poor quality video.

By integrating 31 Pixel Video Fusion™ cameras into the existing building structure and the communications network in the headquarters building, DPS could monitor all entry and exit points, as well as the main parking and concourse areas. Achieving the same solution with 4cif cameras would have required more than 220 cameras. The entire system rode on the same network as other game day media participants and a small amount of bandwidth.