With an increasing number of vehicles – annually more than 4 million customers use 79 car parks (22 of these are public and 57 are for residents), 6 park & ride spaces and a parking garage for buses – SAEMES is constantly occupied with the optimisation of their services.

The focus with this project is on the avoidance of queues in front of the gates as well as on guaranteeing a high safety standard in the car parks. With the increasing number of parking spaces, the demands on staff had increased as well and soon reached a limit. To assist their employees and to improve the situation, the management board decided to use a video system back in 2009. It had to be as intuitive and as easy to operate as possible in order to enable the desired short introduction period and subsequent smooth handling for the typically non-specialist staff.

Since no video solution had been applied before, the French Seetec office was given free reign with regard to system design.  For the implementation of the central approach, only an entirely IP based video solution was possible. The core of the application consists of the Seetec Multi Solution Platform, which has been designed to implement s demands down to the smallest detail. The fully scalable and modular expandable solution is able to integrate additional cameras, I/O modules, features or applications from third party manufacturers at any time.

To manage all the end customer’s locations in a centralised approach, only a distributed installation made sense. For this purpose, an administration server was installed in the headquarter’s control centre. An administrator, who is responsible for the configuration assigns user rights, views and centrally operates all systems. He connects, if necessary, to individual locations. In every car park between 20 and 40 cameras are recording. Their images are stored on a server on site and can be viewed by the security staff. For a clear visualisation of all subsidiaries, the team uses a large Eyevis screen system at the control centre and is therefore able to keep an eye on all events. Due to the display agent functionality, the monitor wall with a total size of 7 sqm wall can be controlled by a conventional Seetec Client. That way several alarms can be shown simultaneously on the 12 46‘‘- displays for example and can be processed from the operator station. The much clearer and more detailed display provides an obvious advantage over the usual PC screen.  It enables a more precise analysis of the situation and allows an early intervention in case of incidents.

In addition to the pure video management functionality of the system, SAEMES decided to apply the Seetec License Plate Recognition at two test locations and linked it with a barrier management system by Eryma. When a vehicle enters the car park, the Seetec LPR Module scans the license plate and compares it with the central license plate data base. If the driver provides additional authorisation by using a special ID card,the gate opens automatically.

Romain Lyon, project manager at SAEMES, draws the following conclusion after almost five years of having the Seetec software in service.  "We began with an earlier version of Seetec 5 and have constantly grown with the software. Of course we keep improving our activities with Seetec to perfectly respond to our customer’s
needs and are truly satisfied with this partnership.”