Geutebruck Provides IP Video System For Saudi Arabia Port
The King Fahd Industrial Port at Yanbu on the Red Sea coast is the Saudi sea gateway for Europe and the fastest developing industrial area in Saudi Arabia. Its CCTV monitoring system, which has to provide high security for valuable cargos and infrastructure, has recently been upgraded with Geutebruck servers, management system, video analysis and GUI to replace a previous IP solution whose performance had proved disappointing.
The project, implemented by Geutebruck Eurasia’s local partner AFHC (Abdulla Fouad Holding Company) is seen by the customer, the Saudi Ports Authority as a template which will now be applied to their other ports.
The previous installation consisted of 245 analog cameras along the perimeter fence, Axis encoders, and an alarm contact interface with the perimeter protection system; a management system and alarm GUI, together with 32 servers, 32 monitors, 32 keyboards and mice.
Its drawbacks and limitations included poor system availability, network problems as a result of the large number of servers, poor system control owing to the high number of monitors and very slow switching. It was taking up to three seconds to switch a camera image to a display screen. In addition the GUI was not able to show multiple alarms or multiple cameras, and each monitor could only show pictures from two or three particular servers.
The Geutebruck remedy was to retain the cameras and Axis encoders but provide a GeViScope management system requiring only six servers, an alarm GUI and GscView display software to enable the number of monitors to be cut to 12.
Given that it is common for a single perimeter protection system to produce large numbers of nuisance alarms (around 1,000 per week at sites like this) the fence alarm output needs to be filtered by a second system to eliminate the mass of irrelevant alarm reports. For this Geutebruck replaced the original third party video activity detection software with its own intelligent video analysis software running on the GeViScope platform. This provides a highly effective intruder detection system which displays both a live picture and a (recorded) event loop on the same monitor less than 200 milliseconds after an alarm is triggered.
Now capable of being controlled by a single keyboard and mouse, the entire system is fast, flexible and responsive. All cameras can be viewed on any monitor. The real virtual matrix enables all cameras to be switched at any monitor, and Geutebruck’s dynamic live streaming (DLS) process drastically reduces bandwidth requirements and enables the display server to comfortably support a large number of simultaneous images. Even with all viewers in use, the system displays multiple cameras in real time without any delay.
Other advantages of the new system include: map based control of multiple alarms from different sources; multiple language support and extremely open architecture. And, compared to its predecessor, the Geutebruck solution proved much cheaper to install and service.