Security System for a New Millennium

Dec 1, 2004 12:00 PM

           

Millennium Park, located in downtown Chicago, is a 24-plus-acre park that includes world-class art, music, architecture and landscape design.

Opened in July, the park's prominent features include a 4,000-seat pavilion, a huge fountain complex, a 16,000-square-foot ice rink, a walking garden, the Millennium Monument and a kidney bean-shaped sculpture called Cloud Gate.

Park officials have chosen behavior recognition technology for use with video surveillance from Cernium Inc., St. Louis. The company's Perceptrak software has been deployed at the park to detect and alarm security personnel about highly specific suspicious behaviors.

First planned in 1997 as a way to create new parkland in Grant Park, Millennium Park spans the Illinois central railroad tracks that have separated the east and west sides of Grant Park for over a century. The park is expected to attract two to three million patrons per year.

“We have a lot of elderly people who patronize our park and we've had several incidents where someone has fallen or been taken ill. We've been able to instantly dispatch our security personnel to help and promptly call for medical assistance,” says Terry Bell, Millennium Park's security director. “Also, the software has made a big difference in the fight against vandalism. Because we're alerted to a suspicious person in time to act, we have prevented many would-be graffiti artists from defacing the garden.”

Perceptrak allows Millennium Park's security staff to simultaneously monitor an entire network of CCTV camera views on a single computer, enabling a single guard to monitor dozens or even hundreds of cameras.

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