Multilayered Perimeter Surveillance for Airports
Every seaport, airport, critical infrastructure facility or base perimeter is different, with unique physical layouts and surrounding terrain. Land, water, hills, trees, buildings and roads all impact the way in which these perimeters are protected. In airports, for instance, runway layouts, staging areas and terminal buildings differ in design and layout – all of which affect sensor sight lines.
Add to these widely varying physical layouts the need for adequate warning and response times for an unwanted intrusion and it is not sufficient to simply know a breach of the perimeter has occurred. Security personnel must be able to assess the threat, track movement both before and after the intrusion and react quickly to deter the security violation.
Perimeter Security
Perimeter security is about deterrence, detection, assessment and action. Traditional methods focus primarily on fence systems and fence alarms. The flaw in these systems are three fold: first and foremost, when a fence alarm sounds the security breach is either in progress or has already occurred; second, current technology is prone to false alarms; and third, these systems provide no tracking, assessment or situational awareness capabilities.
Security officers need more information in order to react appropriately. They need to know the type of threat with which they are dealing, from where the threat is coming, and where it is headed. While fences remain an important physical deterrent, they do not provide a complete solution.
Multilayered Surveillance
A multilayered surveillance approach is critical to protecting high value assets and infrastructure. This approach includes a combination of sensors such as imaging cameras, thermal imagers and radars. These sensors can be networked through a common command and control software backbone, providing situational awareness and implementing video analytics to improve efficiency. A standard scenario might include medium to long range radars, which provide a command view of a large facility and/or perimeter, such as an airport. These can be augmented with shorter range radars, as needed, to eliminate blind spots. These radars would be interoperable with selected cameras equipped with “slew-to-cue” functionality. With this functionality, the radar can detect an intruder, track movement and pinpoint geo positioning, while the cameras provide visual identification and information concerning the impending threat to assist in measuring the response.
Although cameras (either daylight or thermal) are a fundamental part of a security solution, camera-only surveillance can also provide flawed coverage and security. A solution of strictly cameras requires security operators to simultaneously monitor a large quantity of video. Further, cameras provide a relatively narrow field of view as compared to wide-area radars. This means that a relatively large number of cameras must be deployed, along with the associated infrastructure support, to provide acceptable 360° coverage. Successful solutions for wide area surveillance should provide 360° situational awareness using an intelligent combination of radar and cameras.
Summary
The deployment of a multilayered, wide-area surveillance solution enables comprehensive perimeter coverage. Wide area radars combined with slew-to-cue cameras and thermal imagers, provide an important advantage in total system cost and responsiveness. The most cost effective solution uses a family of radars with various range capabilities which are integrated with a family of cameras with diverse range performance, all fully interoperable. The use of radar in the perimeter solution reduces the camera requirement while providing a longer response time which can enable a better deployment of resources. Both factors contribute to lower total system cost and overall maintenance. Thus, an integrated radar/ camera solution provides advantages in both up front acquisition and life cycle costs.