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Hikvision makes an exhibition of itself at World Expo

Thousands of HD fixed and PTZ cameras from Hikvision have been installed in Shanghai’s Pudong District where World Expo 2010 is being held. The six-month-long event at which participating countries show the best of their nation is reviving the tradition of world fairs and expositions, events that have occurred in Chicago (1893) and St Louis (1904), a year in which the extravaganza also played host to the Olympic Games.

Expo 2010 Shanghai China is a $4bn festival set to receive 100 million visitors by October. Visitors will come from 190 countries to an exhibition site of 3,2 square miles that is twice the size of the country of Monaco and features buildings shaped like rabbits alongside violin-playing robots.

The megapixel Hikvision camera adopted for the Expo features a 1/1,8 inch SONY progressive scan CCD and employs the H.264 video compression codec. Redundancy is provided by SD/SDHC local card storage.

The Expo has prompted a city-wide makeover with cameras from Hikvision covering the infrastructure of the Pudong district of Shanghai. In a matter of months Shanghai has unveiled three subway lines and a revamped waterfront. Hikvision’s equipment has been charged with securing this global showcase on a bank of the Huangpu River.

The project is the world’s largest provision of high-definition video, with footage being provided to police at a central monitoring facility. A specification of the client was that cameras should give users the ability to track and zoom in on individuals or vehicles so that facial details and license plates could be observed. In response, Hikvision has supplied HD cameras that met the project requirements, delivering video with resolution of up to 1600x1200 pixels in real time.

The project is offering authorities a flexible monitoring solution by combining PTZ cameras with fixed units. In critical environments with complex optical demands such as entrances, public squares and crossroads where there is extra scope for accidents, the PTZ cameras have been preferred and are allowing management to track and zoom in on targets to acquire facial and license plate data. By contrast, the fixed cameras provide video of simple traffic flow scenes and everyday pedestrian movement for retrospective playback and retrieval.

Confronted on the ground with the client’s demands for image clarity, Hikvision used an HD-SDI interface in preference to the regular CVBS approach, combined with optic fibre for minimal delay. Police and facility managers can therefore exercise PTZ control from the back end with nominal time lag, the delay being less than 250 milliseconds.

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