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St Lawrence Seaway upgrades IP-CCTV

Dubbed Highway H2O, the Seaway is a main route to the heart of North
America. The Welland Canal is 43 km long and connects Lake Ontario
and Lake Erie. Eight giant locks along its route lift ships 99 metres between the two lakes. Remote surveillance of the vertical lifts is
fundamental for traffic management and the safe operation of the locks
for shipping and the public. The St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp.
monitors the entire canal system from a state-of-the-art traffic
control center.
 
A number of IndigoVision 8000 IP Video transmitter/receiver units were
initially installed in 2004 under specific projects to support remote
bridge control along the Welland Canal. Since that time the Seaway has
continued to deploy additional 8000s as well as installing a number of
IndigoVision’s Windows based Network Video Recorders (NVRs). The
various elements of the IndigoVision based IP video system installed
along the Seaway are transported via a high-bandwidth routed network
using both layer two and three segments. Network connections use a
combination of both TCP and UDP Multicast transports dependant upon
bandwidth availability. The Seaway now utilizes 8000s throughout its
extensive canal systems between the Port of Montreal and Lake Erie.
 
The entire CCTV system is now managed using ‘Control Center’,
IndigoVision’s IP Video and alarm management software. Live video is
viewed by a mix of ‘Control Center’ workstations, or where needed by
using 8000s as transmit / receive pairs with analogue monitors. For
certain applications, ‘Control Center’ salvos are used to switch video
views and control cameras as dictated by other Seaway canal control
systems. The salvos are triggered by canal control PLCs, which make
input changes to I/O incorporated in the 8000.
 
Windows based NVRs with about 8TB each of recording space have been
deployed to assist in security and incident management over extended
archive periods. Each server is used to record 30fps 4SIF live video
from remote locations with each easily handling about 32 video streams
and providing an archive period of approximately 15 days. The servers
and direct attached SAS arrays can easily be expanded using inexpensive
high-capacity SATA drives for a total storage space on each NVR of
about 30TB.