The Olympic Stadium in Berlin can seat more than 74 000 spectators for football matches, track and field events or concerts. At the venue, the Panomera multisensor camera system not only provides a comprehensive overview, but also shows details at great distances in unprecedented resolution.
Panomera’s most convincing feature for the decision-makers at the stadium, the police and the senate in Berlin was the way it combines the overall view with simultaneous top detail resolution. Currently, the installed multisensor camera systems deliver 200+ megapixels in real-time. Plans are already in place to expand the system to over 600 megapixels.
With Panomera, a huge area can be monitored in a highly efficient manner. From just a single location, the same area can be surveyed as with multiple HD cameras installed at several locations. “The difference is not just that multiple HD cameras distributed in different places would not work as efficiently due to the fact that the image angle of the individual cameras cannot be ideally directed on the overall scene. Since fewer camera installation locations are needed, the requirements for the infrastructure, such as cables, are substantially lower, along with expenditures for servicing and maintenance,” explained Dieter Dallmeier, company founder and CEO.
Panomera offers yet another major advantage: the overall picture is permanently recorded with top detail resolution. This solves the problem associated with conventional PTZ cameras, which force the operator to decide between the overview view and the detail view.
PTZ cameras have a definite disadvantage. If the operator wishes to zoom into or pan a certain area, only this part of the image is recorded. This means that later, no recording of the overall scene exists, so that incidents in other areas may be overlooked and can no longer be reconstructed.
“Here, Panomera works differently. Even if you have zoomed into a certain part of the scene live, in the recording you can always reconstruct what happened in another part of the picture at the same time. In contrast to a normal PTZ camera, you will not miss anything and can reconstruct incidents in detail even after the fact,” explains Roland Meier, project sales manager at Dallmeier.
Unique operating design
Panomera features multi-user capability. This means that in contrast to PTZ cameras, with which only one operator can pan, tilt or zoom, with Panomera, an unlimited number of operators can navigate across the entire scene independently of each other. Although all operators are connected to the same camera, each of the individual users can select their view individually and zoom or pan as they desire.
The Panomera multisensor systems in the Berlin Olympic Stadium will be monitored from a total of eight control rooms and nine workstations. Operating the system with the SeMSy management software is easy and intuitive. Operators see a slider with the overall scene on their respective monitors. Using drag and drop, they can then enlarge the desired area on the monitor, zoom as desired or move around the entire scene.
Reviewing of the camera images will not just take place at the stadium itself, however. The Panomera images will also be transmitted to the police and will be evaluated remotely by means of SeMSy.
Recording with highest availability
The images are recorded on Dallmeier video servers, which ensure highest availability of the data and, in turn, meet the sophisticated demands of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. The video servers allow redundant recording of the image data on two hard disk drives. In addition, they work with the Linux operating system, which experts consider to be extremely reliable. In order to further increase stability, the operating system was separated from the hard drives and stored on a flash ROM. The power supply is also assured at all times, since the power supply units are redundant.
Dallmeier supplied the Berlin Olympic Stadium an all-in-one video security solution from one source. For this, the Panomera surveillance concept is supplemented by full-HD DDZ4020 PTZ cameras with 20x optical zoom, which, for instance, observe throngs of visitors in the outdoor area. In addition, numerous other already existing cameras in the outdoor areas, such as the existing thermal cameras, were integrated into the Dallmeier system via Smatrix series recording devices. The entire video system can now be operated from a single interface. “This allowed the Berlin Olympic Stadium to continue using its existing technology and at the same time, to expand the system into what is most likely the world’s most innovative stadium security system,” Meier says.
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