St. Petersburg Underground's intelligent video surveillance by Axis

Mission

The Saint Petersburg Metro is the main city traffic artery. It carries over 2 million passengers between 67 stations each year and among the European subways it ranks 4th for its passenger flow and 8th for its line length. The Metro needed an intelligent video surveillance system to ensure the transport security in challenging traffic conditions at all the subway areas open to the public – halls, underground stations, escalators. With the intelligent video surveillance system the subway security would have a better situation awareness and would quickly respond to any incident, run post-event analysis using video records from archive and automatically detect unauthorized passenger actions for further investigation.

Solution

The appropriate transport security system require to be formed on IP basis as backbone of the intelligent video surveillance. The Axis Communications' network video surveillance system demonstrated the best reliability and functionality during the pilot testing and was selected for deployment of the video surveillance system, creation of a video archive and video analysis systems. The task for the system integrator Aspekt Severo-Zapad JSC was to create an archive and two continuous video streams for online monitoring, ensure video transition to several end users simultaneously (multicast mode) and ability of technology Power over Ethernet.

Reliable AXIS P13 Series network cameras with housings were installed at the subway entrances, in halls and along escalators. With digital PTZ control, multiple streams transmitted from several view angles and remote back focus control the Subway situation center staff can monitor all the critical objects from a single point using minimum displays. A perfect balance between sharpness and lens resolution offered by P-Iris, as well as the ability to adapt to challenging light conditions, ensure the precise video analysis results. Vandal-resistant AXIS P33 series dome network cameras offering high resolution and light sensitivity were installed in passages between stations and other places where a compact solution is necessary

Result

The large-scale project was launched in 2014 and is still ongoing. For three years, the intelligent video surveillance system covered 24 subway stations with more that 3200 Axis network cameras installed. And there is more to come – 7 or 8 more stations are planned to be equipped in 2017. The system successfully completes its mission: video surveillance, video archive storage for minimum 30 days, automatic detection of abandoned objects.