Malta’s Grand Harbour into Valletta provides access to cruise ships. Passengers are greeted in this group of islands in the central Mediterranean with a view of ancient cream-colored buildings along twisting streets and hillsides, with limestone battlements, crenellated castles and ancient forts still guarding the harbor entrance, all reflecting 7,000 years of the islands’ sometimes turbulent history.
Today, the Valletta waterfront combines sea passenger terminal facilities with shopping, dining and entertainment venues. It’s a 24-hour destination that is consistently teeming with activity, and hundreds of thousands of cruise passengers from around the world visit every year.
The complexity of the existing infrastructure, weather conditions and sheer scale of the overall installation were a significant challenge for securing the port and its surrounding areas.
A facility big enough to accommodate large ocean liners obviously needs expansive video coverage, but the superior resolution provided by Arecont Vision cameras enables fewer cameras to cover very large areas. Surveillance operators at the cruise terminal can zoom in – live or even on archived video – and see the details of various areas in an image while still preserving the full image. A recent upgrade to the terminal’s surveillance system included installation of 50 megapixel cameras from Arecont Vision, the first and largest installation of 5 Megapixel cameras in the Maltese Islands. The 3 megapixel cameras utilized in this installation send video along an information network — providing greater resolution than images from conventional network cameras. In fact, the 3 megapixel cameras provide images with 10 times the resolution of standard VGA network cameras. Full-motion high-definition digital video combines superior image quality with manageable bandwidth and storage requirements.
The system was installed by Alberta Group, a Maltese provider of fire, safety and security systems. Arecont Vision’s MegaVideo technology enables coverage of large areas with extreme detail, the US makers say. The Arecont Vision AV3100 provides image processing at billions of operations per second and can output multiple image formats to allow simultaneous viewing of the full resolution field of view and regions of interest. The cameras provide four times the resolution of standard IP cameras with the ability to output full real-time frame rates. The 3 megapixel Arecont Vision AV3100 cameras used at the cruise ship terminal in Malta provide 2048×1536-pixel progressive scan images at 15 frames per second.
“Alberta invests a great deal of money and resources into developing and evaluating the best technological advances to provide superior performance to our customers,” said Karim Cassar, Alberta’s Technical Research Executive. “Arecont Vision’s megapixel cameras fit perfectly into our technology-centric approach to the market, as demonstrated by their performance in our installation at the cruise ship terminal in Valletta.”
The cruise ship at Valletta deployed the latest megapixel cameras from Arecont Vision to secure its port and surrounding tourist areas. The system deployed delivers wide area video coverage. With the new system, CCTV operators can zoom in on live or recorded video to see detailed images of any scene.
“Arecont Vision cameras provide unparalleled image quality and resolution for applications world-wide, and their ability to boost image resolution without taxing bandwidth or storage resources is documented at the cruise terminal in Malta,” said Steven Sarfati, Senior Vice President of International Sales at Arecont Vision. “As throngs of passengers travel through the terminal on their way to an historic experience in Malta, Arecont Vision cameras will be keeping a watchful eye with HD resolution.”
