Applications and selections of intelligent surveillance system in railway industry

In the 21st century, railways are as vulnerable as airports and government buildings to vandalism or terrorism. Transport operators have growing concerns on passenger safety and security with railway facilities. Intelligent CCTV surveillance is becoming more important for transportation organisations. Digital video technology is improving on a daily basis in the past few years. Different video compression algorithms such as MPEG-X, Wavelet, H.263 and H.264 offer improved video quality and reduced bandwidth and storage requirement. The video analysis features for unattended packages, intrusion and face recognition are also introduced to the digital recording system in market. Thousand of manufacturers focus on the development of their proprietary intelligent surveillance products to meet the higher demand of varied users. Based on the recent operational requirements in railways, there are several criteria to take into account for the applications and selections of suitable intelligent surveillance system in a railway environment. First, it is necessary to define the resolution, image refresh rate, storage duration and redundancy requirement in the design stage since storage cost is one of the concerned factors in digital video recording (DVR) design of large-scale surveillance system despite the costs of network switch and storage hardware have come down significantly. Second, good video analysis software should consider different indoor/outdoor and various light intensity environments, in order to increase successful detection rate and minimize false alarm rate. In fact, a robust design and cost-effective implementation of intelligent surveillance system for safety and security in the railway industry is critical. In this paper, we will share our experience in the design, selection and implementation of intelligent surveillance system.