Hikvision’s equipment was charged with securing this world showcase by the Huangpu River in which exhibiting countries promoted national identity in their pavilions. The theme of the US pavilion was "Rising to the Challenge", with American innovation and community-building being represented in a multi-dimensional presentation. The UK pavilion, named the 'Seed Cathedral', was constructed from 60,000 seven-metre-long aluminium rods. An exhibit that attracted particular interest was the Saudi Arabian pavilion which featured a hanging boat shaped like a half moon, complete with live date palms on the top deck.

Expo 2010 Shanghai China was a $4bn festival set to receive 100 million visitors by October in 2010. Visitors came from 190 countries to an exhibition site of 3.2 square miles, this being twice the size of the country of Monaco (equivalent to 1,000 soccer pitches) and featuring buildings shaped like rabbits alongside violin-playing robots. The exhibition even featured Copenhagen’s 'Little Mermaid' who travelled from Denmark for the event.

The Expo prompted a city-wide infrastructure makeover of $45bn, and in keeping with the scale of the enterprise, the exhibition site benefited from the world’s largest scale high-definition city surveillance project with 12,000 monitoring points covering the infrastructure of the Pudong district of Shanghai. Thousands of HD fixed and PTZ cameras from Hikvision have been used on the project.

The project is the world’s largest provision of high-definition video, with footage being provided to police at a central monitoring facility. A specification of the client was that cameras should give users the ability to track and zoom in on individuals or vehicles so that facial details and license plates could be observed, requirements that made major demands on product performance and system design.

With the aim of simplifying management tasks, a centralised surveillance framework was implemented at the Shanghai project to manage all the sub systems. Using open architecture, this integrated all the analogue, fixed HD and PTZ HD surveillance products into one software platform which linked the control centre and local police stations throughout the Pudong area of Shanghai. The IP security cameras from Hikvision adopted for the Expo feature a 1/1.8 inch SONY progressive scan CCD. Hikvision’s H.264 video compression codec has been used and redundancy is provided by SD/SDHC local card storage.

Mr Yangzhong Hu, President of Hikvision, said: "The theme of Expo 2010 Shanghai China is ‘Better city, better life.’ It is therefore fitting that the organisers have opted for a security product manufacturer that strives constantly for improvement."

He continued: "The experience we drew on during this project, combined with R & D capability and an innovative approach, allowed us to respond to a demanding brief. The installation demonstrated the lengths Hikvision will go to in order to consolidate its leading position in the security surveillance market, providing sophisticated products that address customers’ real needs at massive infrastructure sites of this kind."