Indoor Lab and Cepton Provide Lidar Crowd Monitoring System for Orlando Airport

Orlando International Airport has installed a new large-scale crowd surveillance system. The platform comes courtesy of The Indoor Lab, which specializes in real-time crowd monitoring using lidar sensors.

The Indoor Lab solution has been dubbed Safe Place, and it is built with the Helius Smart Lidar System from Cepton. The two companies have formed a strategic partnership to promote lidar technology, with Orlando becoming the first deployment for the collaboration. The airport is using seven of Cepton’s Vista lidar sensors to cover roughly 50,000 square feet of terminal.

The Indoor Lab notes that a traditional camera system would require much more hardware, and would have much larger bandwidth and data storage demands. Lidar also offers more privacy, insofar as it does not track biometric data like facial information and skin color. Safe Place simply tracks the dimensions and speed of objects moving in a 3D space, allowing it to record and analyze crowd movements in real time while remaining ensuring anonymity.

According to The Indoor Lab, the information gathered with Safe Place can be analyzed to improve the flow of foot traffic in public areas, and to make sure that people are following social distancing protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. The technology can be used in indoor and outdoor settings in any lighting conditions, and has potential applications in large venues ranging from stadiums to commercial retail facilities.

“A Safe Place enabled environment ensures locations have been cleaned, distancing measures are followed, and safer occupancy levels are maintained,” said Indoor Lab Co-founder and CPO Patrick Blattner. “At the same time, the system can also integrate with point, tilt, zoom (PTZ) cameras to detect potential public safety risks, such as a bag left behind in a public space or people unexpectedly moving at high rates of speed.”

“We worked closely with The Indoor Lab to ensure we were able to deliver the capabilities and accuracy needed for their smart space applications at an affordable price,” added Cepton Co-Founder and CEO Jun Pei. “Our team built a solution that combines intelligent, powerful lidar perception with ease of integration and data efficiency.”

Cepton and The Indoor Lab are not the only companies pushing lidar technology. The lidar sensor developer Ouster recently raised $42 million in a round of Series B funding, while Apple added lidar support to its ARKit 3.5 and Advantech partnered with Quanergy to offer lidar to its own customers.

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January 12, 2020 – by Eric Weiss