new redflex cameras, page-2

Hi,
I was involved in a project to assess all the manufacturers of digital traffic enforcement camera systems for one of the gulf states recently (Middle East). The potential is for about 100 to 200 cameras.

There has been a trial of all the systems with the winer to be announced soon. My inside line is that it is down to 2 of the companies, Redflex being one of them. BTW, this is rumour and I can't give it a high confidence rating.

We had presentations of the technology from all the leading manufacturers and Redflex was the most impressive on several counts but camera resolution wasn't one of them. The unit they used at the time (May 2004) had the lowest resolution of all systems presented, 2 megapixels if I recall correctly.

Their unique seling point was very precise focus and picture taking for the number plate/face shots. In other words, the radar controled camera would snap the picture at precisely the right spot, where the camera was focussed, giving maximum clarity with the resolution available. This was certainly good enough for their back office processing and OCR of the number plates.

Other systems would snap the vehicles within a fairly loosely defined area, the higher resolution compensating for the less precise focus.

As such, we felt that the resolution of the camera wasn't an issue, it was certaily adequate for the job. Increased resolution may be nice but it adds to the data stream/storage part of the sytem and could be counter productive.

The other unique seling point was that the camera's are constantly filming at a low frame per second rate with this video stream going into a digital loop or available for veiwing live over the internet (every single camera is an internet node).

When an infringement occurs you get the infrngement shot, the plate/face shot and the 'movie' from the shots in the loop showing the 6 seconds before and after the infringement. This is particularly useful if anybody argues with the infringement as you can actually see them powering throughthe lights at speed (or whatever - very useful in determining blame in an accident). It was also useful for situations that resulted in an infringement but were fair enough.

An example was a car truning through a red light and generating an infringement. The movie showed that about 5 seconds after the infringement an ambulance powered through the lights and the driver had been clearing the way for it.

Doubling the resolution would mean a massive download from each 'hit' without a great deal of extra benefit.

On the ohter hand, people always want better clearer pictures and it is bound to happen, even though it adds very little in this case.

I hope this was of interest - when the winner of the trial is declared I wil pass on the info. As the choice of system and award of contrat are completely separate issues in this instance, it maybe that no company announcement would be forthcomming until a contractors bid to install the complete system including F.O. cable laying etc, had been awarded. This maybe some months after the conclusion of the system trial.