City of Hobart sets sights on a safer CBD

Hobart City Council — or City of Hobart — governs the central metropolitan area of Tasmania’s capital city. The area comprises 77.9 square kilometres and is home to more than 50,000 people and nearly 6000 businesses. The greater Hobart area has a population of around 220,000, a large portion of which visits the CBD each day.

Tasked with overseeing the safe and efficient operation of a major metropolitan centre, City of Hobart needed a city-wide network of smart safety cameras that could facilitate the management of foot and vehicle traffic throughout the city. The network also needed to provide additional public safety by enabling law enforcement officials to investigate crime faster and more easily.

The limitations of silos

City of Hobart’s legacy security infrastructure had been implemented over the years in an ad hoc fashion. The result was many individual closed circuit security television (CCTV) cameras and associated systems operating in their own information silos. The lack of an integrated network made it difficult for City of Hobart to quickly find and retrieve detailed information related to traffic flow management or to assist the city’s police with investigations in a timely manner.

Network implementation

After obtaining joint infrastructure funding through the Commonwealth Government’s Safer Communities Fund grants program, City of Hobart sought the implementation of a public safety camera system network that would be able to cover a large, high-traffic stretch of Hobart’s central business district.

After consulting with its integration partner, Jettech Networks, City of Hobart selected Axis Communications to provide it with a range of fixed dome network cameras, many of them with multidirectional capability, providing a 360-degree view to dramatically extend visual coverage of four-way intersections without the need for additional cameras.

The deployment of over 200 network cameras to some of Hobart’s busiest areas has delivered City of Hobart with more than 300 video feeds with which to easily identify traffic flow or public safety issues in many areas it could not prior to the installation of the Axis Communications cameras.

In conjunction with the implementation of video management software from Milestone, City of Hobart now has the ability to quickly find and share footage of incidents in public areas with police to help with criminal investigations within minutes of a request from law enforcement.

Moreover, the capabilities offered by the combination of Axis Communications’ network cameras and Milestone’s video management software gives City of Hobart the ability to implement analysis technology that will be able to identify traffic and public safety issues in real time.

Incidence response improvement

Since City of Hobart first began implementing the Axis Communications network camera system across the Hobart CBD, the organisation has vastly improved the range and capability of its safety surveillance coverage.

The installation of the smart camera system has been underpinned by the building of a fibre-optic network, which provides City of Hobart with a fully centralised network model that can enable full access and control of all connected cameras in the network from a central hub dedicated to public safety within the organisation.

The connectivity and control of all Axis Communications cameras in the network has slashed the time it takes City of Hobart to respond to requests for footage of incidents from police, with the process now taking closer to 15 minutes from request to delivery, instead of days. This has dramatically improved law enforcement’s ability to quickly investigate and solve crimes throughout the city.

The information and visual data delivered by the Axis Communications camera network has also given City of Hobart the ability to analyse movement throughout the city, providing invaluable data that can be used by the organisation to make better public infrastructure decisions now and into the future.

For example, data from the Axis Communications network cameras can now be used in City of Hobart’s digital twin project, informing 3D models of the city in conjunction with drone footage to enable people counting and crowd management in real time.

Over time, it is anticipated that the full capability of the system will be utilised, providing real-time analysis and data for artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can be used to help better understand and manage movement throughout the city as it occurs.

Image credit: iStock.com/chameleonseye