On match days, major challenges for a football ground are to ensure crowd safety, to provide early warning of potential problems before they have time to escalate and, wherever possible, to identify potential miscreants before they even enter the ground.
Even on non-match days, football grounds are still busy, and the CCTV system has an essential role to play in ensuring a high level of general security.
To help address these challenges, Coca-Cola Championship club Preston North End asked TG Baker, one of the UK’s leading specialist suppliers of CCTV systems for sporting venues, to review its existing CCTV installations and to provide enhancements that would deliver increased effectiveness combined with a high level of future proofing. In response, TG Baker put forward solutions based on equipment from Siemens Building Technologies.
"We chose Siemens products partly because of our very positive experiences with them in other applications," said Chris Aspinall of TG Baker. "More important, however, was the extensive range of CCTV equipment offered by Siemens, which meant that we could always be sure that we would have access to the most appropriate product for every application."
The Preston North End CCTV project involved a new CCTV installation for the club’s recently completed Invincibles stand, and a complete overhaul of the existing CCTV installation for the remainder of the ground.
The Invincibles Stand development also includes a Long Term Conditions Centre (LTCC), a National Health Service facility that provides a wide range of medical treatments. Although this is not an integral part of the football club, it was considered desirable for the centre’s CCTV installation to be linked with the club’s CCTV systems.
After reviewing the existing CCTV equipment at the ground, TG Baker decided that all of the existing cameras should be replaced immediately. Siemens Solaris domes were used within the ground and in some of the concourse locations, while PTZ models were chosen to cover the outside areas, where the very visible presence of a CCTV camera is often an effective deterrent to would-be miscreants.
Most of the Solaris dome cameras used in the ground are types with a 26x zoom capability. These allow the CCTV operators to zoom in for a close view of any activity that might require further investigation. A new Solaris model with 36x zoom capability has, however, been chosen for use in two of the most critical locations.
These new extended-zoom cameras, which are being used at Preston North End for the first time in a sports venue application, are capable of providing even more detailed images that can be used, for example, to aid facial recognition.
Siemens digital video recorders were used for the project, two of which are in the match-day control room and provide a total of 3 TB storage capacity, which is sufficient to record high-resolution images from 16 camera channels for a full football season. Two separate DVRs are used for 24/7 recordings of key areas, and provide sufficient capacity for the images to be stored for 31 days.
Images from the Preston North End CCTV installation are monitored 24-hours. On non-match days, during normal office hours they are fed to monitors in the Facilities/Stadium manager’s office, where a local Siemens user interface unit provides full control over all cameras and recorders.
Outside office hours, the images are monitored by operators from a third-party security specialist that also provides keyholder services for the club and can, therefore, quickly investigate any suspicious activity. The operators are assisted in their task of detecting suspicious activity by Siemens CMS software, which allows them to view images from multiple cameras simultaneously in a single window.
A link, which proved easy to implement with the hardware, is provided to the separate CCTV installation for the Long Term Conditions Centre. This means that the operator monitoring the images from the main Preston North End installation can instantly view the inside of the clinic in the event of an alarm activation.
Preston football club is finding that its new CCTV system is providing benefits in terms of performance, reliability, versatility and ease of use. The systems is making a contribution to achieving the club’s key objectives of providing a safe, secure and comfortable environment at all times for supporters and staff.
