Case Study: Smarter Transportation with Network Video Appliances

Next time you’re sitting in your car stuck in a traffic jam during a bad commute, take a moment to reflect that if it weren’t for streaming video, things could be worse.

Today, the Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in more and more states are monitoring their highways via streaming video. They are integrating digital video surveillance and monitoring systems into their so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and although to a jammed-up motorist the term "ITS" may seem to be an oxymoron (like "military intelligence"), these ITSs are indeed intelligent enough to be improving the traffic flow on many U.S. highways.

One company that has found success in the ITS market niche is VBrick Systems. A VBrick is a box-like, brick-shaped network video appliance. You connect a VBrick to your network (usually an Ethernet) and then connect a surveillance camera to your VBrick, and it converts the analog video to digital video (usually MPEG-4 or MPEG-2) and multicasts it around your IP network.

VBricks are currently being used for traffic monitoring by DOTs across the country, including Florida, New York, Utah, and California, and internationally in South Korea and Taiwan.

In Florida VBrick has teamed with Traffic Control Devices, Inc. (TCD), a Florida-based ITS design/build integrator to deploy over 100 VBrick network video appliances to modernize and expand highway traffic monitoring capability of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT).

Video of traffic flow is captured by 100 cameras strategically located on concrete poles along Interstate and local roadways. Each video stream is encoded into standard MPEG-2 format by VBricks and multicast in real-time to the Regional Traffic Management Center (RTMC) and the Orlando Operations Center (OOC) over a multi-node switched 1Gb Ethernet network for viewing and analysis by FDOT and city employees. The ability to multicast video transmissions allows any agency user to obtain desktop images of the current traffic conditions, regardless of the user's location on the intranet. And it accomplishes this without appreciable bandwidth overhead.

The system also helps to manage traffic problems and enable citizens to avoid areas of congestion, shorten travel times, and simplify commuting. These images are also transmitted to local TV stations for their daily traffic reports and will soon be available on the Internet for direct public access.

"Delivering high-quality video over an Ethernet network to central monitoring facilities provides real benefits to travelers," says Robert Ledford with Traffic Control Devices. "It is a great example of how newer technologies can save money and improve efficiencies."