Brandýs nad Labem-Stará Boleslav in Czechia is known as “the city of two cities”, as a pair of towns on both banks of the Elbe River; the two towns of the Prague-East District were merged in 1960.
The City Council in 2006 began work on the municipal camera surveillance system (MKDS). There are multiple camera points across the city, including Komenského Square, the bus station, the town hall, and the Garden ice rinks. As part of a wider public safety agenda, the council wanted to install ANPR cameras to better understand the flow of vehicles entering and exiting specific areas of the city to inform traffic management. This data can also be used in spatial planning.
In use are, from Hanwha Vision, ten PNO-A9081RLP and 10 XNO-6123R/RW cameras, wwith AI-powered Road AI and RoadWatch functions; alongside an SSM recording server, decoders, the TID-600 intercom and more. It was a new installation that needed to provide control room staff and frontline police officers with footage of vehicle makes, models, colours and licence plates. The Police of the Czech Republic and crisis management authorities also have access to the system as part of cooperation with the city.
The PNO-A9081RLP offers Brandýs nad Labem-Stará Boleslav what the manufacturer calls an all-in-one solution featuring ANPR, Make/Model/Colour Recognition (MMCR) and vehicle classification analytics – all pre-installed and licensed. As for the city’s traffic surveillance, the cameras cover one lane of traffic at speeds up to 70km/h.
As witness accounts quite often may be inaccurate or incomplete, and particularly so with regards to vehicle licence number plates, the ability to search for vehicles by make, model and colour is of a help to investigators when seeking footage of a vehicle involved in an incident. Similarly, as criminals frequently swap the licence number plates on vehicles, to avoid ANPR identifying them as stolen, police can use the make, model and colour search criteria to cross-reference against reports of stolen vehicles. Since the launch of the system, several stolen vehicles and criminals have been detected. Vehicles are also classified into seven vehicle types (car, SUV, van, LCV, truck, bus or motorcycle), allowing operators to provide quicker responses to traffic incidents or reports of dangerous driving. Operators can gain long-term insights into road and parking usage, and planners can take trends into account when considering widening roads or creating new bus and cycle lanes.
Meanwhile, the XNO-6123R/RW cameras come with RoadWatch ANPR, which gives ANPR and direction detection. It’s for monitoring urban traffic and can cover one lane of traffic travelling up to 90 km/h and 30m IR (infra red). Key events and information are intuitively displayed for operators, aiding their situational awareness and response times.
Eventually, the plan is to connect the outputs from the two camera models to police databases to aid incident response times, and investigations. City police can see what’s happening on a video wall or with remote footage on their phones and tablets.
Since the traffic solutions were installed, the city police have used the footage for forensic investigations into crimes. The CCTV is also a visible deterrent for dangerous drivers.
Expansion of the system is planned, depending on subsidies available to support it. Brandýs nad Labem-Stará Boleslav also plans to use Wisenet Wave, Hanwha’s video management software, for mobile connectivity for responders.
