Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) has once again turned to GMV for renewal of the onboard video-surveillance system of Barcelona’s metro trains.

TMB currently runs a metro fleet made up by various train series, each of them fitted with different video-surveillance systems, all of which use analog technology and suffer from various degrees of obsolescence. This has triggered an upgrading project to implement a uniform video-surveillance system on a total of 149 trains from 8 different series and running on the lines L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 and L11 of Barcelona Metro.

The project comprises the supply of 300 video recorders, 300 communication nodes, 600 antennas, 760 video coders, 740 Ethernet switches and 540 IP cameras. This new system will also be integrated with existing CCTV systems on 8 train series, maintaining a total of 2038 analog cameras.

The core of the system under this project is the GMV-designed digital recording equipment to capture images in Full HD resolution, with the capacity of replay and simultaneous exporting. The recorder guarantees ONVIF compatibility, thus catering for recording searches, parametrized deletion, exporting, protection and automatic management of obsolete recordings, in a standardized way.

One of the functions to be implemented on this new wireless communication channel is real-time video broadcasting to ground, so videos from all trains along the line can be viewed from any of TMB’s control centers.

The system is topped up with state-of-the-art digital cameras with infrared vision for nil-illumination recording in the cab and in tunnels. The system will also have an onboard display terminal in both driver cabs for real time supervision of any of the unit’s passenger zones.

For the moment the new system with GMV technology will run alongside the existing video-surveillance systems to guarantee a seamless transition to the new system without impairing the current service.