FC Dordrecht promotes CCTV surveillance system with Canon

Canon’s network security cameras improve the safety and security of fans with more accurate monitoring.

Background
Dutch football team FC Dordrecht was recently promoted to The Eredivisie, the highest professional football league in the Netherlands. The club needed to upgrade its security system to ensure that the growing numbers of fans attending home games were kept safe. At the same, it was important for FC Dordrecht to work more closely with local authorities to better protect the club’s facilities as well as its fans.

The current upgrade to the security system is an interim solution for a year, as the club has plans to build a new, modern stadium with a far larger capacity and with a state-of-the-art security system to match. The project was intended to test how the technology performed under real-world conditions, with the aim of replicating the security system within the new stadium when it is built in 2016.

Challenge
FC Dordrecht currently has around 4,500 loyal supporters. Now that the club has been promoted to the premier division, the size of the crowds that attend the games is expected to grow dramatically, both in terms of home supporters and those attending from visiting teams.

The club was faced with the challenge of upgrading its security system – a collection of analogue cameras – to protect a higher volume of supporters.

The Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) regulates the Dutch professional and amateur football leagues throughout the Netherlands. One of the KNVB’s key responsibilities is regulating and assessing the overall safety of stadiums for clubs in The Eredivisie in order to ensure a suitable level of security for all clubs in this league. With the previous security camera system, FC Dordrecht could not achieve the KNVB safety requirements, and so a system upgrade was essential as the club progressed to the country’s top football league.

The stadium security team needed security cameras that were capable of monitoring action on the field, as well as in the stands and in the car park to ensure all attendees were kept safe and secure. There was also a particular need to be able to identify the faces of fans in the stadium, so that the authorities could quickly recognise individuals if there were any incidents that required further involvement from the police.

“We were looking to completely revolutionise our security system,” said Jacques de Zeeuw, security officer at FC Dordrecht.

“We wanted to record extremely high-quality images at all times, particularly in parts of the stadium with minimal light. We felt that moving from analogue to digital was the only way to achieve this.”

As part of the club’s long-term security strategy, the security team needed a solution that would be capable of offering advanced facial recognition for the new stadium which is planned for 2016. To accommodate this, the team needed to ensure that the cameras it selected for this project could provide technical compatibility with specific facial recognition software. This feature will be particularly of importance to the local police, who work closely with the stadium security team to protect players and spectators.

Solution
The security team at the stadium identified the need for cameras that could cover extremely wide areas from each individual device. They held in-depth conversations with the system integrator, CNI Europe BV, and selected Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) cameras to feature within the installation.

Following a test of available cameras on the market, CNI Europe BV and FC Dordrecht selected four Canon VB-H41 PTZ cameras. The VB-H41 devices were selected thanks to their Smart Shade Control (SSC) offering. The Canon cameras improve visibility of foreground objects in bright backlit scenes, helping the security team to identify contraband objects being brought into the stadium, and also easily identify the faces of any individuals. The low-light capabilities of the VB-H41 cameras offer true day/night operations, ensuring great results in a range of environments so that fans can be kept safe, regardless of the time of day of matches.

The Video Management Software (VMS) that is used with the Canon cameras means that during this time of transition between the old security system and the upgrade, the stadium can run the seven new Canon cameras alongside the existing analogue cameras, helping to ensure that visitors are kept safe during the system upgrade.

“CNI Europe BV has been working with Canon in the Netherlands for some time, and thanks to the PTZ capabilities of the VB-H41 cameras in particular, these cameras were the perfect fit for the current stadium’s security upgrade. Based on the success of the project to-date, we’re excited to continue working with Canon as part of the bigger security project for the new FC Dordrecht stadium which we hope will be developed in the near future,” said Frank Goldewijk, owner of CNI Europe BV.

Results
Since the installation of the Canon VB-H41 PTZ cameras, the security and detection capabilities at the club have been completely transformed. Thanks to the image quality and the PTZ capabilities of the Canon cameras, the security team is now able to zoom in to different areas on the stadium to keep an eye on any potentially suspicious activity. For example, the stadium security team previously had issues with people bringing fireworks into a particular section of the stadium. Since implementing the Canon security cameras, the team has been able to identify people more quickly that are attempting to bring banned items into the facility.

The police team that works with the FC Dordrecht stadium has also been delighted with the results since the new cameras have been installed. Due to the excellent results already seen, the team is working on a future collaboration with the police which would enable them to monitor live images captured on the Canon cameras from the local police station. The aim of this project is to ensure that the cameras are compatible with the complete network of the club and the police team, ensuring advanced protection of fans and the ability for the police to immediately see if extra support is needed as a result of any unforeseen incidents.

“Our local police department is delighted with the Canon cameras installation. A team of five officers joins us at the club for every match to oversee the grounds in order to better protect our fans and players. The team regularly mentions the superior image quality, the image sharpness and the zoom capabilities that our new cameras can now provide. All of these improvements have had an extremely positive impact on security at the stadium,” concluded de Zeeuw.

Company: FC Dordrecht | Location: Dordrecht, the Netherlands
Services: Football stadium | Products: Canon VB-H41 PTZ cameras
Website: www.fcdordrecht.nl | Twitter: @fcdordrechtnl

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