“ We’ re family-owned and operated, doing business against multinational conglomerates with tens of thousands of vehicles,” says Christopher Dean, son of Kellie Dean and business intelligence and analytics coordinator of Dean Transportation“ We’ re proud of the personal service we provide our customers.”
Dean Transportation constantly monitors new developments with regards to site surveillance and on-board vehicle technologies. In an effort to learn more about new advancements with these technologies, Dean started to research and learn about systems with real-time onboard surveillance capabilities, system status dashboards, and open development platforms.
“ We transport more than 60,000 students daily, so having to physically touch a camera’ s hard-drive in order to review footage is becoming more and more difficult,” Dean says.“ In case of emergency, we may need to see what’ s happening in real-time and we need to know that our systems are functioning properly.”
Dean Transportation began making inroads with Arete Technology, located in nearby Grand Rapids. Arete’ s expertise is in cellular technology, internet services, asset management and video technology.
Through an on-site consultation, Arete conducted an analysis of Dean Transportation’ s requirements.
“ Dean Transportation needed IP( Internet Protocol) cameras rated specifically for vehicles,” says Mitch Kimball, founder of Arete Technology.“ Furthermore, we needed to ensure that they received cameras which would display the high-resolution video and audio they required, paired with our cellular connectivity to exchange all of that information.”
Kimball says the obvious choice for Dean Transportation was Axis Communications, a manufacturer of network cameras, video encoders and video management software with a specialization in transportation. Axis is a world-leading provider of network video solutions for professional installations, and the company invented the original IP camera in 1996.
“ Arete explained their relationship with Dean Transportation, and we showed them what we can offer in terms of onboard video,” says E. Anthony Incorvati, business development, transportation at Axis Communications.“ It resonated well, because of the Arete team’ s communications & cellular background, so they proposed our system to Dean.”
Trialing the Axis system
Arete Technology and Axis Communications proposed upgrading all of Dean Transportation’ s on-site security with Axis cameras. As part of that, the three companies embarked on a product trial on five school buses and one motorcoach.
Christopher Dean says he was immediately cognizant of the scope and expertise of the Axis organization.
“ Before connecting with them on this trial, I did not know much at all about Axis Communications,” he says.“ As I learned more about them, I realized they are a major player in the site-security industry.”
“ We always want to do our due diligence and make sure we ' re utilizing the best technology available,” he continues.“ We ' re always analyzing our operations to make sure we ' re using technology to the best of our ability. We saw Axis’ s advancements in hardware and software and thought,‘ How can we use this to increase the safety onboard our vehicles and at our facilities?’”
Axis manufactures purpose-built IP cameras for onboard environments, drawing from experience all the way back to its first IP camera.
“ I like to call IP cameras‘ computers with lenses’,” Incorvati says.“ The CPU processing power of IP cameras has grown over the years, in the same way any computer’ s power has grown since the technology’ s inception.”
That increased processing power, Incorvati says, has enabled several advancements in video surveillance – increased image quality, better performance in low-light, back-light and blinding-light conditions,
to name a few – but none more important than the advent of open architecture in video surveillance.
Open architecture refers to an open platform in which Axis calls theirs the Axis Camera Application Platform( ACAP). With this open platform, the camera essentially becomes the server that can support and run in camera application. With Axis, as Incorvati puts it, it means“ we create an open and easy platform that allows for third-party application developers to create“ apps” which run on the camera … almost like how apps would run on your smartphone”
For this Field Test, Arete led an implementation that included Axis cameras and a software platform called Observit C3( Camera Connected Cluster). This trial represented North America’ s first deployment of the Observit platform. Observit is a long-time Axis Application Development Partner that has always specialized in the onboard video management environment. However, and more recently, Observit have taken their NVR / server-based software approach and has developed C3 – which is an in-camera, server-less and cloud-based approach
OCTOBER 2018 | BUSRIDE. COM | 23