Ohio’s Nationwide Arena, home of the Columbus Blue Jackets of the National Hockey League (NHL), is protected by an outdated, end-of-life security system.
The cost to maintain and repair it was becoming unsustainable. The system is composed of multiple disparate systems with different interfaces and management systems, and multiple requirements for software updates and support.
Situational awareness
The Security Director of the Arena wanted to modernise the system to enable proactive alerts for situational awareness and a unified platform to manage and visualise all 350 cameras installed across the venue.
Offering a camera-agnostic solution, Hive Logic chose to keep the existing camera deployment and retrofit it with a powerful video management system. A 3-cluster enterprise server is used to manage all video streams and access control systems, empowered by Hailo’s AI accelerators for high-computer workloads.
The Product
The Hive software enables video management, access control, and AI video analytics running applications such as:
- People count to monitor the entrance and exit of the venue.
- Zone management for high traffic/dwell time.
- Security forensics to identify regulation violations and crime.
- Storage and search to identify past events and provide video evidence.
- Iron Link servers from Velasea are used in a cluster, sharing data to distribute workload and uptime. Each server is equipped with a Hailo
Century 0804 PCIe acceleration card with 104 TOPS.
Why Hailo?
- Lower Cost: The previous system did not include AI capabilities. GPUs were considered in the past but were too expensive to deploy at such scale. Hailo brought the most cost-effective solution while maintaining high computing capabilities.
- Scalability: Hailo’s scalability allows more cameras without overloading the central processing infrastructure while maintaining high accuracy in detecting and identifying objects.
AI/ML pipeline
“Hailo is the ideal choice for our product because it enables real-time analytics on camera streams, without relying on a central analytics server. This enhances bandwidth efficiency and overall performance while reducing power consumption."
"Now we have a very robust AI/ML pipeline to rapidly deploy new AI models onto our edge devices," said Nate Green, Hive Logic, CEO.
Effective and simple
“I am grateful for HIVE and the wonderful technologies they offer as a standard package," Barry Kirby Security Director, Nationwide Arena.
"The introduction of Hailo then makes it a highly effective and simple system to navigate.”