GMV renews the onboard video-surveillance system of Metro de Barcelona

Barcelona Metropolitan Transport (Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona: TMB) has once more placed its trust in the technology multinational 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.

Each metro train will also carry onboard two recorders working in redundant mode, providing a high-availability recording system. Each train will also be fitted with an onboard ring-redundancy multiservice Ethernet, which will not only provide support for the new video-surveillance system but also furnish other systems with connectivity as need be in the future.

The implemented network will also have two communication nodes in redundant architecture, concentrating the onboard information not only of the new video-surveillance system but also the other systems. Through a wireless link this will then be passed on to TMB’s operations centers.

The train-to-ground link will use Wi-Fi and 4G/LTE technology, choosing the most appropriate channel at each moment to suit the train’s location, thus guaranteeing unbroken, quick and robust communication.

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.