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Approximately 700 buses in the Maryland Transit Administration's fleet are receiving upgraded systems that will allow faster access to video surveillance footage.

Image courtesy MTA

The system allows video to be downloaded wirelessly into a central repository where officers can access the video for quicker investigations.

Image courtesy March Networks

Colonel John E. Gavrilis, the chief of police for the Maryland Transit Administration Police Force, runs what he calls a very safety conscious transit operation. With over 16 million passengers using his systems and an already low number of incidents, Gavrilis intends to keep it that way, and is doing so by implementing a video surveillance upgrade on the buses in his system.

To do so, the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) has begun deploying new video surveillance systems that allow video captured on the buses to be remotely "dumped" to recorders at the bus depots using new technology from March Networks. The system synchronizes and downloads the video wirelessly when the buses arrive in the station thanks to capabilities in the March Networks devices.

According to Gavrilis, that makes the job of his investigators a lot easier. Prior to this latest, on-going upgrade, the system required manual dumps from the DVRs, which meant more work for officers working on a security investigation, and sometimes multi-day delays days before they could obtain video from the buses. Cameras certainly aren't new to MTA buses; Gavrilis says the system has used cameras on buses for almost 10 years. But now the video can be available almost instantly, he says, and that means that cases don't grow cold in the meantime. Getting video quickly means faster identification of suspects, witnesses and crimes, and allowing remote downloads of the video means officers are focused on investigations, rather than technical processes of obtaining the video. "In investigations, time is critical," says Gavrilis.

The technology uses wi-fi hotspots in the equipment depot. When buses arrive, they wirelessly authenticate themselves, and the video management system initiates a dump into the central archive. Depending on the configuration of the system, the system can dump all video or just video tagged by alarm buttons, accelerometers and other I/O devices. Tagged video can this be used to initiate priority downloads of the most relevant video surveillance footage.

Buses, of course, are not the most hospitable place for high-tech electronics, but the system takes that into account. Units are hardened against voltage spikes, fine dust particulates, vibration and moisture (the units are IP65 rated, which means they could be blasted by a fire hose and wouldn't allow moisture in).

In the future, Gavrilis says the system can take on entirely new value in the future. Plans are in place to expand the technology such that MTA officers in mobile squad cars could eventually obtain the video instantly, in real-time from a bus once a wireless network is in place to transfer the video and once receiving technology is put into the squad cars. The system has technology in place that can allow GPS tagging to alert nearby police officers.

"This is about making video accessible," explains March Networks' Vice President Peter Wilenius. "Once you can access that video instantly over a wireless network, you have another tool for crisis management."