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Making every journey safer

One of Australia’s largest transport and logistics companies with more than seven thousand staff, more than six billion dollars in assets and more than seven thousand kilometres of rail track and a strong and powerful integrated passenger and rail infrastructure business, has over the past few years moved away from their legacy CCTV system to Geutebrück technology.

On an average day, it carries more than 170 000 passengers on more than 1000 trains and moves more than 669 000 tonnes of freight. Its new cutting edge CCTV solution with a distributed architecture that captures all relevant incidents and supports central control room staff with lots of automation and selection of important information is one of the keystones of their success in providing safe and secure journeys. The system provided by Geutebrück is a

high-redundancy, low-latency, low-bandwidth system which interacts with the legacy equipment and manages over 4000 cameras and several hundred DVRs.

For the customer it was crucial that the new CCTV system would capture quality images of all relevant events — even those that are only discovered later — yet not be slow or overloaded with irrelevant data from static or routine images. Qualifying the video using basic activity detection and in some instances, 3D perimeter detection, effectively filters out irrelevant static footage and reduces the data volume to be transmitted and recorded. In addition, ‘fading long-term memory’ (FLTM) is used to reduce storage requirements even further. This ensures the system retains high frame-rate recordings of recent events (when detailed information is most required), but then saves space by gradually reducing the frame rate of archived footage as it ages.

High availability

In analysing serious incidents, the immediately preceding few minutes of video are often the most vital. So to prevent these being lost in the incident itself, they are always stored locally in a fallback cache which is used to complement the off-site recorded video. In addition, given that heat is a significant concern, a solid-state disc for the operating system, dual PSUs, and full RAID subsystems from Geutebrück are used to ensure hardware reliability. High availability is further supported by a network-wide distributed health monitoring system, and a camera position authentication function that reports any camera tampering.

One award-winning technical innovation which came about as a result of the project was the development of a software product called GeViCentral. This video management tool controls, monitors and operates video networks with thousands of cameras on hundreds of sites just as elegantly as a few cameras on just a couple of sites.

Thanks to the use of simple intuitive formats and the system’s ability to learn the operators’ intentions from the context and to assist with pre-emptive action, GeViCentral delivers the effortless operation and high levels of automation which the customer needed for such a huge project. Other particularly useful features include the alarm hierarchy which enables the user to give top priority to incidents involving people, and the facility for tasking operators with certain jobs with the processes guided by the system.

“We developed the video management system in conjunction with a South African software developer called Fourier Systems,” explains Anthony Brooks of Geutebrück. “We had support from Geutebrück in Germany, and a lot of input from the customer. GeViCentral was actually built using the SDKs Geutebrück provides free with all its products. It is scalable and flexible so it can be customised in great detail to meet unique requirements, and it is great to see it is already being used in other projects worldwide.”

Efficient operation

A team of three operators in a central control room manage the whole video network which covers 200 sites, some of them up to 2 000 km away. With 25 or so incidents a day which have to be referred to the police, there is also a specialist team of operators who pull out the relevant video evidence. Under the old system, the company had a backlog of several weeks but now they are up to date.

The GeViCentral Maintenance Console allows the system administrator to configure many system parameters, and to allow or disallow access to any functionality on a per-user or per console basis. Furthermore, access to sites, cameras or alarms may also be selectively permitted or restricted.

As the system is operational 24/7, both Windows and SQL Server clustering and Hyper-V are supported. Most parts of the system may be disconnected, downed, re-started, and even replaced, with minimal impact on the rest of the system. Various Connection methods are accommodated. Connections to sites vary between LAN, WAN and ISDN, with configurable site usage limitations per connection method. Connecting to sites is seamlessly handled by the system.

The camera list may be filtered by functional group, site, usage, or availability. Each camera in the list may be viewed, reviewed, viewing may be blocked (for selected users or user groups), controlled, transferred, and much more. Detail for each camera contains additional information and dynamically shows the camera status, including how and by whom it is being used. Cameras may also be part of private or public guard tours. The Check Camera feature allows the user to compare the current camera signal with a previously stored reference frame.

System actions, user interaction, and user responses to alarm actions are recorded in the central audit log. The logged items further include: system start-up and shutdown; system problems; user log-ins and log-in attempts; camera access for live viewing or review; configuration changes; task handling; alarm handling; etc.

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