Asia’s largest rail network, Indian Railways, is using an Idis video solution integrated with facial recognition as part of an ambitious, multi-phase technology upgrade targeting significant growth.
With around 14,000 trains operating on 65,000 miles of track, Indian Railways carries an estimated 9.5 million passengers daily, and is modernising its systems as it looks to handle up 40% of global rail activity by 2050. Following a competitive tender, the Idis video solution has been rolled out by leading Indian systems integrator M2M Cybernetics in partnership with Idis Securitatem Solutiones Pvt Ltd, a joint venture with Idis. The first stage project, in the eastern region, covers 230 stations with the highest daily footfall.
The video system, which included 4K cameras, AI-powered video analytics, and facial recognition, was installed across hundreds of platforms. A monitoring centre at every fifth station allows the Railway Protection Force to conduct simultaneous live viewing of each location, with monitoring hubs managed using a federated architecture to provide an overarching central command and control room, which also serves as a data centre and disaster recovery facility.
Monitoring staff are supported by Idis Deep Learning Analytics (IDLA) – with functions including motion, loitering, and abandoned object detection and line crossing, continually refined to ensure industry-best performance – which make it easy to configure and automate alerts to a range of potential risk events.
Facial recognition is also a key feature of the upgrade, and the Idis solution was seamlessly integrated with Herta Security’s facial recognition technology, which uses advanced algorithms to provide real-time identification and alerts to persons-of-interest.
Idis Intelligent Codec combined with MAT compression technology delivered a 30% data bandwidth reduction, with no compromise on crystal clear image capture. Further savings on storage were delivered by Motion Adaptive Technology (MAT), which adjusts recording when there is no movement in the scene.
Cyber security was also paramount for Indian Railways, and all Idis devices cleared the OWASP Level 2 – Appendix C certification standard, going beyond standard penetration tests. The entire solution operates on the Idis Solution Suite (ISS) VMS platform, handling multiple high-performance Idis servers in a federated architecture. ISS comes with vital features including Critical Failover redundancy, storing video data on a high-speed Storage Area Network (SAN) utilising RAID 5 to protect against gaps in recording during network interruptions. With the Idis Mobile Plus app, Railway Protection Force staff can also take advantage of enterprise-class VMS tools via their smartphones or tablets.
ISS also allows image and video capture from smartphones to be fed into the surveillance system, adding significantly to the potential surveillance reach – for example, allowing local staff to send on-site reports of damage or incidents, channelling them directly to command centres.
“Indian Railways wanted the most flexible, robust, future-proof video surveillance solution to provide a secure foundation for growth and development plans,” said Rahat Jain, Managing Director, Idis Securitatem Solutiones Pvt Ltd. “With Idis video, the Railway Protection Force now have full confidence that they are operating 230 of the safest and most secure stations, resulting in two more regions being identified for upgrade.”
