Video Surveillance Keeps Airports Safe 24×7

Air Travel Will Again Break Records

I am writing this from Singapore, the tiny city-state in southeast Asia known for incredible food, endless shopping, and the world’s best airport, Changi. Though Singapore has just 5.6 million residents, 2019 was another record-setting year for Changi with 68 million passengers. While COVID-19 has had a profound effect on travel, industry watchers expect that once a vaccine for COVID-19 is found, air travel will rebound and even soar to new records.

The Need for 24 x 7 Video Surveillance

Regardless of how many passengers visit an airport in a given year, safety is always paramount.  A significant tool to keep people safe is airport video surveillance.

As camera costs have dramatically fallen and camera quality has substantially improved, airports continue to add cameras to enhance safety. Some airports have more than 10,000 cameras operating around the clock, every day of the year.

Advances in software have also had a multiplier effect. Instead of a human needing to identify a potential issue on screen, surveillance analytics autonomously identify people approaching restricted areas, sense fire before smoke detectors sense smoke, flag abandoned items, warn of queues in excess of airport standards, and of course find lost parents.

The Need for Unstructured Surveillance Data Storage

While video surveillance analytics identify potential issues in real-time, there is also a need to record and retain the unstructured video for trend analysis, investigations, and prosecutions.

One of the world’s top 10 airports by passenger volume recently undertook an initiative to upgrade their cameras from standard definition to 4K and 8K at a full 30 frames per second. 8K cameras generate 800% more data than a standard definition camera.

The increase in the unstructured data generated results in the need for more data storage. Ordinary storage would not be able to deliver all the requirements of the airport. The airport’s requirements included:

• Performance—the ability to capture thousands of data streams without dropped frames
• Reliability—zero data loss, even due to disaster
• Expandability—grow on demand as more cameras are added in the future
• Affordability—a solution with was within the airport’s budget

After reviewing various options, the airport’s integrator and the airport decided upon Quantum ActiveScale object storage.

ActiveScale Object Storage Meets All Needs

Quantum ActiveScale object storage is perfect for airport unstructured video surveillance data, as well as other archive needs in industries such as genomics research, medical imaging, and energy exploration, to name a few.

While operating at disk speeds for high performance, the use of erasure coding spreads data across multiple systems which may be operating side by side or on the other side of the planet.  This data spread protects against data loss caused by hardware failure, natural disaster, and even terrorism.  As storage needs grow, additional storage can easily be added with minimum effort by IT as ActiveScale will automatically integrate the new storage.  And of course, ActiveScale compares favorably to traditional storage systems in terms of cost.

Case Study on One of the Top 10 Airports in the World

For more details, check out a case study on one of the world’s Top 10 airports in the Solution Brief: “Video Surveillance Infrastructure Solutions for the Global Airport Industry.”

Visit Singapore

When travel rebounds, if you have a chance to transit through Singapore, be sure to check out Jewel, the newest addition to Changi Airport.  Boasting the world’s largest indoor waterfall as well as hundreds of shops and restaurants, your home shopping mall will never look quite the same to you!