Marine Ports

ports

Ports, waterways, and bridges play an important role in both national security and the global economy. It is critical to deploy the right technology to deal with these challenging environments, while providing the best possible information to the decision makers.

Key Factors for Decision Makers

Protect national assets - Ports are often a national border to open water. Without the right technology they can be an attractive target for acts of terrorism.

Ensure efficient flow of commerce - Tools that can provide small improvements in efficiency can make a large difference with billions of dollars worth of commerce flowing daily through some of the larger ports.

The Challenges

Wide area of coverage - In order to handle the transit of large ships and containers, ports comprise very large areas. This makes it difficult to achieve full video coverage, as well as difficult 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.

Environmental conditions - Ports are often most at risk and least efficient when plagued with difficult weather conditions such as fog, rain, and low-light conditions.

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 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.

Although the Pixel solution provides excellent low visible-light performance, this isn’t always enough. To effectively deal with situations such as fog and rain it becomes important to integrate radar, thermal and IR solutions into a security system. Pixel's open architecture and standards-based platform makes this possible and practical.

Example – International River Border

The Department of Homeland Security wanted a solution for maritime domain awareness along a half a mile wide river, which is an international boundary between the U.S. and Canada. Along the waterway are critical assets: a bridge, a major U.S. steel plant, and gas and oil facilities. It was impossible for PTZs to capture all activity along the river. Hundreds of cameras would have been required to cover the necessary area. Also critical to the project was immediate delivery of the video data to key responders, including the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Patrol, the Port of Authority, and the State Police.

Where there once was no practical solution, now there is. The Pixel Video Fusion™ system’s delivery of high-definition video at nominal bandwidth consumption enabled a wireless solution that is capable of simultaneously transmitting more than 50 cameras worth of video to the Coast Guard command center. At the same time, the video is delivered to the other key responders, thereby disseminating critical information throughout the metro area.