At the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Dallmeier’s new Panomera is in use.
The stadium can seat more than 74,000 spectators for football matches, athletics events or concerts. The German manufacturers say that the Panomera multi-sensor camera system provides an overview, and shows details at distance. The installed camera systems deliver 200-plus megapixels in real time. Plans are in place to expand the system to more than 600 megapixels. From a single location, the same area can be surveyed as with multiple HD cameras installed at several locations. Dieter Dallmeier, company founder and CEO, said: “The difference is not just that multiple HD cameras distributed in different places would not work as efficiently due to the fact that the image angle of the individual cameras cannot be ideally directed on the overall scene. Since fewer camera installation locations are needed, the requirements for the infrastructure, such as cables, are substantially lower, along with expenditures for servicing and maintenance. Today, Panomera is the most cost-effective camera system on the market,” he added. The overall picture is permanently recorded with top detail resolution. This, the makers add, solves the problem associated with conventional PTZ cameras, which force the operator to decide between the overview view and the detail view. PTZ cameras have a disadvantage; if the operator wishes to zoom into or pan a certain area, only this part of the image is recorded. This means that later, no recording of the overall scene exists, so that incidents in other areas may be overlooked and can no longer be reconstructed.
“Here, Panomera works differently. Even if you have zoomed into a certain part of the scene live, in the recording you can always reconstruct what happened in another part of the picture at the same time. In contrast to a normal PTZ camera, you won’t miss anything and can reconstruct incidents in detail even after the fact”, says Roland Meier, Project Sales Manager at Dallmeier.
Operating design
Panomera features multi-user capability. This means that in contrast to PTZ cameras, with which only one operator can pan, tilt or zoom, with Panomera, an unlimited number of operators can navigate across the entire scene independently of each other. Although all operators are connected to the same camera, each of the individual users can select their view individually and zoom or pan as they desire. The Panomera multi-sensor systems in the Berlin Olympic Stadium will be monitored from a total of eight control rooms and nine work stations, operating the system with the company’s SeMSy management software. Operators see a slider with the overall scene on their respective monitors. Using drag and drop, they can then enlarge the desired area on the monitor, zoom as desired or move around the entire scene. Images will also be transmitted to the police and will be evaluated remotely by means of SeMSy.
Recording
The images are recorded on Dallmeier video servers. The video servers allow redundant recording of the image data on two hard disk drives. They work with the Linux operating system. To further increase stability, the operating system was separated from the hard drives and stored on a Flash ROM. The power supply is also assured at all times, since the power supply units are redundant.
The Panomera surveillance concept is supplemented by full-HD DDZ4020 PTZ cameras with 20x optical zoom, which, for instance, observe throngs in the outdoor area. Numerous other already existing cameras in the outdoor areas, such as the existing thermal cameras, were integrated into the Dallmeier system via Smatrix series recording devices. The entire video system can now be operated from a single interface.
“This allowed the Berlin Olympic Stadium to continue using its existing technology and at the same time, to expand the system into what is most likely the world’s most innovative stadium security system,” Roland Meier says.
