Page 15 - Campus Security & Life Safety, March/April 2020

“Our video systems are a key piece of technology used to keep our students and drivers safe.”
By Barbara Rizzatti
recorder. Stone Security is the systems integration partner responsi- ble for the implementation and maintenance of the solution.
Stone Security made sure the installation went according to Canyons School District standards: They worked around the district’s tight bus schedule, keeping the system flexible in dealing with special situations and emergencies. More than 85 of the district’s buses were installed with the new mobile video system during the summer of 2017 and the rest of the total 175 buses were upgraded in preparation for school to start at the end of 2018. In the future, when Canyons School District adds buses to its fleet, they will be outfitted with the same solution.
“Stone Security and the manufacturers have been awesome part- ners,” Glanville said. “We started this project after school ended in June, the same day we began to repave the bus yard. The logistics of getting old camera systems removed and new ones installed while at the same time having buses parked at many temporary locations was daunting. Stone Security handled it with grace and even finished a week ahead of schedule.”
An important component of the solution is that the system must use open platform IP-based, industry-standard components. Tradi- tional analog solutions only use proprietary cables, cameras, DVRs, etc., but the school district wanted to make sure that it moved to an open standard, so that if problems arise, it would not be locked into any vendor, and a range of expansion options would be possible.
A Connected Solution
The Canyons School District solution includes on-board two, three or four AXIS M3037-PVE 360-degree cameras per bus depending on the size of the vehicle, and a Sintron mobile recording server that is fully-customizable, ruggedized and Windows OS-based. Administra- tors can manage the OS, group policies, updates, and software from a centralized location with Microsoft System Center Manager.
The server includes a built-in UPS to protect it from battery drops as the engine starts and stops, as well as loss of power in the case of a vehicle accident. It provides PoE to the cameras and has options for GPS, cellular, multiple storage locations, WiFi as well as the capabil- ity to read data from a CAN-BUS network.
“We use the open platform VMS for many of our school-based systems. By also using it in our buses, it makes it easier on our Prin- cipals and Administrators because they don’t have to learn multiple systems,” Glanville said.
The open platform video management software was selected because it allows the recording server to be located on the bus and manage itself, while an interconnect add-on enables the video to be transferred from the buses anytime the they are near a school or in the main bus yard over WiFi. Operators can retrieve video in a matter of hours following an incident rather than days.
“We developed a new way to deploy the VMS for transportation,” said Andy Schreyer of Stone Security. “We’re using XProtect Expert on the buses, with XProtect Corporate in the data center, and XPro- tect Interconnect as the connection between the systems. We were able to craft a flexible solution that didn’t exist previously.”
Schreyer explained that video is stored redundantly within the bus both on the server as well as within the cameras. If there’s an accident that takes down the server, video from the cameras can be retrieved.
Stuart Monk/Shutterstock.com
trators know what happened.”
Upgrading to Open Platform Technology
After several years of dealing with an older, failing analog video sys- tem on its buses, the district needed to update the fleet. The district’s Transportation Department together with the IT Department spent two years researching technologies and best practices to find the right mobile video security system. The team ultimately specified a system that includes VMS from Milestone Systems, network cameras from Axis Communications and Sintron Technologies’ mobile server/
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