printer friendly version

Best practice from Paris

As South Africa’s next big event on the world stage draws closer, there is a growing awareness of the need to provide secure and reliable transportation to both visitors to the FIFA Soccer World Cup and beyond this, to the commuters who will be making use of local urban public transport.

This is according to Carlo Klopper, African Region Leader for GE Security.

“We believe in building on the experience and best practice of projects that have been successfully implemented around the world. Fortunately, within GE Security we have a significant database to use for reference. Perhaps one of our most applicable and noteworthy successes has been with the security system installed in Paris, France, for the city’s underground and express trains,” says Klopper.

GE Security has installed a digital video surveillance system incorporating 8000 cameras distributed across 400 stations for RATP, a public organisation serving both the industrial and commercial sector. RATP is responsible to the Ile-de-France Transport Authority for the management of the Parisian public transport infrastructures including the Metro, RER, buses and tramways.

“To give an idea of the scale of the responsibilities undertaken by RATP and how vitally important its security programme is to the Parisian public, it is worth remembering that the company manages more than 2,6 billion trips every year,” comments Klopper.

RATP decided to deploy a more powerful and more effective video surveillance system to decrease risk, as well as to play a key role in passengers’ flow control and management.

To this end, RATP decided on GE Security’s VisioWave product line, because of its reputation for providing a fully distributed, high quality digital video surveillance system.

This includes meeting the needs of video switching and recording, integration of audio features, alarms management and video processing. Moreover, VisioWave is able to integrate and protect existing equipment, and intelligently leverage the RATP ATM backbone network QoS capabilities.

Klopper explains: “RATP and VisioWave have a common vision of next generation, intelligent video surveillance systems, allowing security staff to concentrate on critical tasks or emergency situation management. These types of digital technologies allow for the integration of image processing applications within the system itself.”

RATP is implementing VisioWave’s advanced image processing for:

* Crowd density estimation on platforms.

* Unattended object detection.

* Abnormal behaviour in crowds or in specific areas.

* Passenger counting and statistics.

* Camera status and maintenance.

In addition to applications for rail, VisioWave has also been chosen by RATP for use on the buses with VisioMT, a digital video surveillance and content distribution video device. It is this concept of mixing video surveillance with video information broadcast features that opens new opportunities in terms of increasing passengers’ comfort, as well as in terms of accelerating return on investment of such systems.

“We believe that the solutions that work for the challenges of the urban environment in Paris are also valid for the urban environment in South Africa. There are always local realities and specifics that need to be taken into account, but global expertise goes a long way to supporting the search for the way forward,” concludes Klopper.

Share this article:

Further reading: