Aerea networks smartens businessparks
With security technology evolving, business parks and industrial areas can become ‘smart’ protected areas. Traditional ways of surveillance become more efficient and successful by extending the human eye with smart devices and improving human memory and alertness with databases to store surveillance information. At many business parks the local government, security officials, the police and the entrepreneurs already work alongside to reduce and resolve burglaries and other crimes. The investment in a high-tech solution improves the success rate of such a cooperation even further.
Keeping a watchful eye 24/7
The combination of visual IoT sensors and cloud technology offer light weight, yet powerful automated security solutions. An IoT camera processes all video content on board. Only the results of recognition and metadata continue their way along the pipeline. That keeps bandwidth low and recognition independent of Ethernet failure. Storage of relevant information in the cloud and monitoring recognition in the browser keeps information accessible to track down events and alarms. As technology never tires or gets bored, it can keep a watchful eye 24/7; an additional major advantage.
Business parks in Brabant become smart
A collective of business parks in Brabant, a southern district in the Netherlands, made the choice to smarten their industrial and business areas. “With our solution we could offer the combination of on-site technology, fast communication infrastructure and a central registration platform. The solution offered, met all the requirements the collective was looking for, without the former need of an expensive data infrastructure” says Nicholas van Hoey Smith, owner of AEREA networks.
“The exact location of the business and industrial parks is kept secret, to maximise the effectiveness of the system. Knowledge of a security system makes it more vulnerable, despite the carefully taken precautions and security measurements. The preventive effect of the smart ANPR cameras will do their job best when details and operation levels stay unknown, ” he continues.
Edge and cloud technology combined
At all involved business areas, a series of smart ANPR cameras have been installed to oversee both incoming and outgoing traffic. The cameras are connected via a secured 4G VPN connection to a central database, where all the meta data is stored. Recognised license plates are stored including an image, the time of the event, direction and additional car data like make, model, year of build and colour. All the relevant information can be easily retrieved and monitored via a custom made dashboard, made accessible via any browser.
“Our cameras execute multiple tasks on board, that used to run off-camera not too long ago. For the sake of convenience we call them smart ANPR cameras, but they can do so much more than just license plate recognition. They are genuine multipurpose and secured communication devices, that can perform a multitude of real-time tasks in parallel and on the edge,” tells Walter Verbruggen, sales manager of AVUTEC.
Scalability ensures a future proof solution
Security demands and processes differ per business park or industrial area. Some will require proactive surveillance where a manned guarding service, mobile patrols and an alarm centre take care of round the clock supervision. In other places, a reactive solution will be sufficient, lowering their operational costs. In such cases, camera surveillance and database storage will do. Incidents can be inspected afterwards.
“In this project the choice was made for a reactive solution. The dashboard enables the easy retrieval of events for inspection. A major advantage of the solution installed here, is its scalability. The amount of connected cameras can grow with future demands easily. And turning it into a proactive surveillance solution is done with just a few adjustments,” Nicholas van Hoey Smith says.
AEREA networks
Already back in 2013 AEREA delivered and operated M2M connectivity for the earliest IoT devices in the field. In 2019 AEREA and AVUTEC started their cooperation, where AEREA delivered the M2M communication infrastructure, installed and operated the smart and remote managed ANPR sensor systems on the edge, as well as the central registration ecosystem in the data center, saving the end user a lot of operational and communication costs. The effectiveness and performance of their previous ANPR system improved dramatically by using AI powered AVUTEC recognition sensors, only communicating their meta data for storage and retrieval on demand.
