China Hebei Langfang Safe City Project

Background

Langfang, Hebei province, is located between Beijing and Tianjin, and known as the "Jewel in the Beijing-Tianjin Corridor." As the only passage to Beijing from the south, Langfang has a high requirement for public security protection. To address challenges brought by its rapid economic development, Langfang's police department and Huawei started to work on the city's video surveillance project.

Huawei made a thorough analysis of Langfang's progress in ICT, and proposed a "smart city" solution. After several rounds of high-level communication and visits, the Langfang municipal government signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Huawei in 2011 for building a "Smart Langfang." In the same year, Huawei developed smart city e-Police and checkpoint systems for Langfang.

In February 2012, Langfang decided to upgrade its existing video surveillance system into an HD digital system. Huawei immediately invited the customer to visit its "safe city" showcase in Kunming, Yunnan province. After in-depth communication and meticulous study and comparisons, Langfang's municipal government and police department decided to invite Huawei to guide the technical design of Langfang's safe city project. Huawei won the project over a number of competitors due to its advantages in technical strength and solution design.

Key Challenges

• The existing video surveillance system did not provide unified management. In addition, images taken by SD cameras were not clear enough to effectively help investigations. • The old platform could not efficiently protect recorded data. Incidents of video loss occurred from time to time. • The lack of intelligent analysis services led to the following problems: • Manual browsing of surveillance videos consumed the time of large numbers of personnel. • Even if a digital video system was operating normally, the system could not detect a faulty analog camera. When an incident occurred, police would find that the relevant analog surveillance video was blurred, damaged, or even unrecorded. • The customer needed a new platform to provide video quality diagnoses in order to improve system maintenance. The new platform needed to detect image quality exceptions such as image loss, blue screen, frame freezing, and mosaic.

Huawei Solution Huawei provides end-to-end peripheral units such as the platform (including software, servers, and storage units), network, cameras, and decoders. Huawei's HD camera uses the second-generation Exmor CMOS chip that features back-lit sensor technology. (A large-capacity back-end ISP and Huawei-proprietary coding algorithm secures Huawei's leading position in the camera industry.)

The new platform supports the GB/T28181 protocol, which permits integration with the existing platform and unified management for all network elements.

The integrated hardware architecture enables every hardware unit to store, distribute, and forward data streams, thus minimizing the number of faulty points. The platform provides cluster deployment and two-level security protection for data in the hard disk and host layers, preventing video data loss.

The platform also enables timely maintenance with intelligent video quality diagnosis functions that detect image exceptions and generate relevant log reports. When an exception occurs, the system automatically generates an alarm to notify on-duty personnel of the need for inspection.

Customer Benefits

• The highly scalable system enables large-scale expansion for the future. • The new system covers all key areas in the city, substantially improving public security and raising case investigation efficiency by more than 20 percent. • Intelligent video quality diagnostics facilitate labor force distribution, improve security efficiency by 30 percent, and enable 24/7 video surveillance services.

The Langfang safe city system has 3,000 surveillance sites, which is not enough to cover the entire city. To meet their security protection needs and promote social and economic development, the Langfang municipal government plans to expand the system to cover all subordinate districts, at a market value of up to USD50 million to 70 million.