ELECTRONIC CONTROL IN REGULATED PEDESTRIAN AREAS

KINEO has installed several access control systems for regulated pedestrian areas in recent years. The most noteworthy cases are in A Coruña, where we have 26 free access points (e.g. without bollards) monitored under the SmartCity project, 10 access points with bollards in Balmaseda (Vizcaya) and 8 points in Zarautz (Guipuzcoa).

In all these electronic control cases, identification is via reading vehicle licence plates to verify whether they have an access profile as residents, public services, distribution of goods, etc., or, at least, control of the time between entry and exit. Additionally, a picture of the vehicle is taken with the access context as evidence associated with any possible penalties or fines.

The architecture of these solutions can be centralised or decentralised depending on the availability of optical fibre to allow video to be sent in real time for OCR processing in order to identify vehicle licence plates, check against central databases and save the access, and then crosscheck with exits or even directly generate the proposed penalty fine in the event of directly forbidden access (and not only limited by time or within a specific schedule). In these cases, only the cameras are installed on the street; the process software and hardware are installed in the customer’s data centre, or can even be virtualised.

Decentralised electronic control systems are necessary when the licence plate process is done locally at each access point due to a lack of stable communications which allow remote management. In these cases, a complete system for processing and matching data against local databases is installed at each access point. These databases are synchronised by synchronous or asynchronous means, in accordance with the availability of data transmission; it is often enough to refresh once a day (usually at night). The bulk of the process is handled at each access point, and data loads are low and can be sent via GPRS/3G.

We have KINEO ACCESS CONTROL as a web-based management platform for easier operation by multiple agents, all under a policy of access profiles and electronic tracking of their actions on the system. We have added a multitude of supported features thanks to the feedback of many of our customers over the years. This is a 100% KINEO in-house development, so we are flexible when it comes to customising it, for example with regard to language.

Some of the supported features include multiple blacklists and whitelists, capacity control, access ticket management with notification of balance via SMS or email, automatic face distortion in context photos, etc.