Hikvision’s megapixel dome cameras are being used at Nuremberg railway station in Germany, the largest railway station in northern Bavaria which currently receives 130,000 passengers every weekday. The cameras are allowing station management to protect travelers and provide them with context-sensitive information.
As part of continuing improvements in customer care and heightened vigilance against terrorism, Deutsche Bahn has begun to transform its operational control centers and is upgrading camera surveillance from analog to IP systems. These measures are part of information gathering at control hubs known as ‘3-S Centers’ where video streams, audio signals, telephone and radio messages are assessed so that appropriate action can be taken.
Hikvision's megapixel dome cameras are being used at Nuremberg railway station in Germany, the largest railway station in northern Bavaria which currently receives 130,000 passengers every weekday. The cameras are allowing station management to protect travelers and provide them with context-sensitive information.
As part of continuing improvements in customer care and heightened vigilance against terrorism, Deutsche Bahn has begun to transform its operational control centers and is upgrading camera surveillance from analog to IP systems. These measures are part of information gathering at control hubs known as ‘3-S Centers' where video streams, audio signals, telephone and radio messages are assessed so that appropriate action can be taken.
Passengers communicate with the control centers using information/emergency columns on the station platforms at Nuremberg and the Hikvision cameras are positioned nearby so that officials can see high-quality images of the platforms and surrounding areas at resolution of up to 1,280 by 960 pixels. Staff are able to make specific announcements to individual travelers including wheelchair-users, giving advice that is appropriate to their situation or difficulty. They can also discount frivolous activation of emergency buttons, perhaps by schoolchildren with a simple evaluation of images.
The Hikvision cameras have been installed as part of a turnkey emergency and logistical solution designed by the Munich-based systems house Indanet who work closely with Hikvision as a technology partner and specialize in the public transport and traffic management sectors. These megapixel cameras offer H.264 and MPEG-4 dual-stream real-time video compression with various frame rate options according to usage demands.
Hikvision cameras support VMS from many major vendors. On this project the cameras are operating from the control centre management system developed by Indanet. It is based on their control centre software which unifies disparate categories of data into a single, future-proof solution that makes cost-effective and ‘green' use of legacy equipment where appropriate. Disciplines can include surveillance, help points, passenger information, access control, fire prevention and track-to-train communication.
“The Hikvision cameras are proving robust in a demanding environment and the price-to-performance ratio is impressive. We are also able to access technical support from Hikvision's European office in Amsterdam with excellent response levels and informed advice. At a major railway station with extensive subsystems there are many demands on bandwidth and RAID storage. These cameras make efficient use of the H.264 codec to compress video streams without compromising image quality,” said Jurgen Fuchs, Director of Strategic Projects at Indanet.