One of the key problems in airport security is the sheer size of the perimeter and a large number of incidents are in fact linked to unauthorised access onto the airfield, either runways or where aircrafts are being loaded or refuelled posing an extremely high risk.
Most airports will combine multiple sensors and technologies to protect the actual perimeter fence and even beyond the perimeter fence, to warn of potential threats.
Some airports have found the level of information generated by the perimeter security systems quite challenging to deal with and they wanted to decrease the number of events so operators could focus on what was critical. The Airport development team at Genetec integrated the OPTEX LiDAR sensor into their Restricted Security Area (RSA) Surveillance module, an extension of the Genetec Security Center platform with the purpose to unify data from the sensor and camera to present more meaningful information to the operators.
The RSA module has been designed specifically with a view to providing wide area protection and integrating with wide area surveillance technology, including radar, fibre optic and laser detection devices. The solution allows security staff to determine the level of threat for each area, map them, and utilise OPTEX technologies to identify and locate quickly and precisely the point of intrusion.
For instance, with Fibre optic fence sensor, zones can be 100m-200m long and will identify people cutting through a fence, crawling under or climbing over. Newer fibre technologies provide point location. Another way to pin-point exact intruder location is with OPTEX LiDAR technologies or with Radar. A particularly intelligent feature of the system is its ability to ‘fuse’ data (known as ‘target fusion’) coming from multiple sources and confirm an event as a single (i.e. the same) activity rather than multiple threats.
For instance, using the X & Y coordinates provided by OPTEX REDSCAN sensors, RSA allows to map exactly the path of the intruders or moving vehicles, fuses the path from one camera to the other and considers it as one event, one target and tracks it precisely on the map.
This gives a more meaningful picture to the operator and presents events in a unified and intelligent way. This helps support the security team in making the right decisions.
The deeper integration of OPTEX’s technologies into Genetec’s RSA platform enables intelligent tracking and event categorisation, making it a very precise security system for airports.
