Cloud CCTV Services for Trains

Cloud CCTV Solution for Train Surveillance

Award-winning project in the category “Software Outsourcing Project 2023” by ANIS – Romania’s Association of the Software Services Industry

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Enterprise-grade Cloud Solution to facilitate remote access to CCTV video footage on trains.

Client: ADComms – a key supplier across the rail industry in the UK integrating intelligent, next-level technologies into trains and stations.

Services

Custom development of a CCTV Management System for the concurrent communication of hundreds of trains in Cloud with near-real time availability for surveilance footages used by Police and Railway.

Technology

C#, .NetCore 2.0, Entity Framework, MVC
Azure: App Service, Service Fabric Cluster, Load Balancer, Network Security Groups, SQL Server & other
Ffmpeg, nginx
Angular 5 (recently upgraded to Angular 6), videojs
MicroServices, DDD
Machine Learning

Challenge

ADComms turned to rinf.tech with a request to build from scratch an enterprise-grade Cloud solution to facilitate remote access to CCTV video footage on trains in the UK.

The project goal is to allow safer travel conditions and close monitoring, to adapt journeys to passenger volumes and to extract relevant camera footages for risk events.

The solution’s core architectural needs were as follows:

data consistency,
performance,
scalability,
security.

Solution

The solution we offered consisted of four parts:

1. On-train Windows services

Responsible for receiving requests from the cloud, communicating with the cameras, extracting videos, and uploading them back to the cloud.

Functional features:

Train health monitoring

Staring/resuming services

Collecting & tracking GPS data each second and sending it instantly to the cloud

On-train service security app configuration

2. Cloud services

Intermediary layer between users and trains, storing the entire application. This feature is responsible for collecting and storing all data from all the trains.

3. The Web application

This application allows users to interact with the cloud system and trains.

It exposes video footage from the train based on time intervals and GPS location. Once a video request has been processed on the train, the video is stored in the cloud and becomes available for playback in the browser.
Cloud notifications to BTP (British Transport Police) of videos that might help them in their investigations.

4. The SPSO – driver application

built with UWP for on-train tablet display, it provides drivers with access to the trip information system,
gathers train information (heating, speed, altitude, localization, train events) from sensors and alarms,
allows drivers to trigger manual alarms (trespass, object on rails, train strike)
real-time viewing of on-train cameras,
collection of information pushed to the cloud to improve “driving behavior”: instructs the driver when to brake, what speed to reach and maintain, etc.
monitors driver’s behavior during the trip.

Additional components include

Hazard Notifications (Tresspasing, Object strike)
Passenger Counting System and  Heatmap
Trains Tracking & Journey Data
Doors Monitoring
Vandalism Detection, Camera Tampering
InTrain Help Point management

Project Engineering Team

Solution Architect, Product Owner, DevOps, Technical Lead, PM, Developers and QA Engineers.

Results

This custom-built CCTV solution is currently running on UK trains.

It allows for significant improvement of UK train surveillance, the quality of all on-train services, and passenger and driver safety.

In 2013, rinf.tech won the ANIS (Romanian Employers’ Association of the Software & Services Industry) Award in the category “Software Outsourcing Project of the Year” for their ADComms’ solution for the Digitalization of UK Transportation.