The Latin American Security Association (ALAS) recently hosted the ALAS Management Summit in Miami, which recognised the best security projects in Latin America and the Caribbean during 2017. In this year’s edition there were 49 projects participating in the different country categories of Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Chile, Panama, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Spain.

The jury, made up of six renowned industry professionals, evaluated and chose the projects that best contribute to the safety of people, property and properties in Latin America and the Caribbean. Herta was selected as the winner of “Best Latin American Security Project” with its “Video surveillance System with Facial Recognition in Uruguayan football”.

Herta’s project has been running since April 2017 with the aim of controlling violence in sporting venues. The Uruguayan Football Association held an international tender to select a facial identification system for the main Uruguayan football stadiums. The system had to perform access control with face recognition for all persons entering the stadiums, in addition to making a complete scan of the stands.

Field tests were carried out jointly with the ITC consultancy and the Ministry of the Interior of Uruguay with dozens of solutions from various manufacturers. Finally, the solution selected for the implementation was the one offered by Herta. This solution, integrated by CDT Latam, includes Wavestore as VMS, Axis cameras and Huawei networking.

Herta’s US CTO, Alex Collado-Castells, carried out the system design with a high emphasis on robustness, making it possible to detect and identify multiple faces simultaneously. “The environment was a challenge for us – the cameras located at the stadium entrances had to perform very well against background lighting and extremely bright scenarios due to the sun light”, explains Collado-Castells. “Our software was able to detect and identify 99% of the subjects in the database with no false positives. We are very proud of our performance and to be able to protect people and families at football matches.”

“This project sets a precedent for many other football stadium projects that we have already closed in this region and they undoubtedly are a reference for all of Latin America”, says Fernando Dominguez, Sales Manager.