IP Video Helps Provide Safe Environment At Grand Canyon Resort
An innovative wireless surveillance system is helping to cut crime and provide a safe and secure environment for visitors to the Grand Canyon West Resort in Arizona.
IndigoVision’s complete end-to-end IP video system has been deployed at multiple sites, providing an integrated surveillance solution across a wide area. Grand Canyon West is a popular tourist destination on the west side of the Canyon owned and operated by the Hualapai tribe. The resort includes Skywalk, which allows visitors to ‘Walk the Sky’ on a horseshoe shaped glass bridge that overhangs the Grand Canyon.
“From a single location we can now monitor several remote locations that have no connectivity,” said Robert Bravo, the resort’s security manager. “The IndigoVision system has helped us to reduce crime, monitor inventory, resolve disputes and improve our customer service. These have always been a challenge for us due to the nature and location of our business.”
Several sites, including Eagle Point (home of the Skywalk), Guano Point, a hotel, fuel depot and airport, are all centrally monitored from the airport terminal building. The facilities are located several miles apart and are completely standalone with no cabling or infrastructure between them. All the sites are powered by their own generators. Each local IP network is interconnected using the HughesNet satellite broadband network. There is also a secondary link to Peach Springs, the Hualapai Nation’s capital, which is over 60 miles away from the resort. Each of the remote locations can also be monitored from Peach Springs.
“IndigoVision is the only solution we know of that can broadcast the high-quality images required by the resort, with the very low bandwidth required by the satellite network,” said Bill Miller, president of Reliable Security, IndigoVision’s approved system integrator that designed and installed the system. “IndigoVision’s approved system integrator that designed and installed the system said The company’s excellent compression technology also ensures that latency is kept to a minimum, allowing smooth PTZ camera control over long distances.”
A mixture of 57 IndigoVision fixed and PTZ series 9000 IP cameras are installed across the resort and airport. The 9000 series uses H.264 compression to dual stream video across the network. Each camera outputs two streams, one with a lower bitrate for transmission over the satellite network, and one with higher resolution for recording on IndigoVision standalone NVRs, located locally at each site.
“Our security team at the airport terminal and Peach Springs use ‘Control Center’, IndigoVision’s Security Management Software, to view live and recorded video from each camera,” Bravo said. “The software is very powerful and easy to use and allows us to view feeds from multiple sites on a single monitor.”
Bandwidth and storage requirements are further reduced by the use of an innovative feature called ACF -- Activity Controlled Framerate. ACF is built into IndigoVision’s IP camera and effectively makes the camera act like an alarm motion detector.
When no motion is detected in the scene the video is transmitted at a very low framerate. When motion is detected, the video is automatically transmitted at the maximum framerate configured. The resort uses this feature extensively when the facilities are non-operational. The ACF feature is automatically switched on when the resort operation is closed. This is achieved through a schedule configured in ‘Control Center’.