Thousands of HD fixed and PTZ cameras from Hikvision have been installed in Shanghai’s Pudong District where World Expo 2010 is being held. The six-month-long event at which participating countries show the best of their nation is reviving the tradition of world fairs and expositions, events that have occurred in Chicago (1893) and St Louis (1904), a year in which the extravaganza also played host to the Olympic Games.

Expo 2010 Shanghai China is a $4bn festival set to receive 100 million visitors by October. Visitors will come from 190 countries to an exhibition site of 3.2 square miles that is twice the size of the country of Monaco and features buildings shaped like rabbits alongside violin-playing robots who serenade spectators. The opening ceremony focused on a lavish display of fireworks, fountains and laser lights with the waterfront glowing amid 1,200 searchlights, lasers and mobile fountains. Over a hundred world leaders are slated to visit and the opening was attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The theme of the US pavilion is “Rising to the Challenge”, with American innovation and community-building being represented in a multi-dimensional presentation. Forty-five thousand people a day are lining up for two-hour waits to see this attraction alone. The Americans have impressed with their linguistic skills; 175 US students with fluent Mandarin are staffing the pavilion and demonstrating their interest in the host country.

The UK pavilion features a ‘Seed Cathedral’ constructed from 60,000 seven-metre-long aluminium rods. It has been designed by architect Thomas Heatherwick and the message is ecological: this has been created by a Green Britain. The ‘cathedral’ has been inspired by a seed repository on the south coast of England run by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. Thousands of surplus seeds have been embedded onto the ends of the rods and when the interior is penetrated by daylight the seeds acquire colour in the manner of stained glass. A reverse process occurs at night and the structure glows, while in the wind it moves like a dandelion head.

The megapixel Hikvision camera adopted for the Expo features a 1/1.8 inch SONY progressive scan CCD and employs the H.264 video compression codec. Redundancy is provided by SD/SDHC local card storage.

The Expo has prompted a city-wide makeover with cameras from Hikvision covering the infrastructure of the Pudong district of Shanghai. In a matter of months Shanghai has unveiled three subway lines and a revamped waterfront. Hikvision’s equipment has been charged with securing this global showcase on a bank of the Huangpu River.

An exhibit attracting particular interest is the Saudi Arabian pavilion which features a hanging boat shaped like a half moon, complete with live date palms on the top deck. The United Nations Pavilion has seen the launch of a Chinese version of the environmental film “Home” by the French reporter, director and environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The showings at Shanghai follow incarnations on DVD, Blu-ray, TV and YouTube. When it opened in 181 countries, the film broke the world record for the scale of a simultaneous release. The footage is composed almost entirely of aerial shots of our planet, showing both the fragility of its ecological balance and the diversity of life forms.

The surveillance 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. In response, Hikvision has supplied HD cameras that met the project requirements, delivering video with resolution of up to 1600x1200 pixels in real time.

The project is offering authorities a flexible monitoring solution by combining PTZ cameras with fixed units. In critical environments with complex optical demands such as entrances, public squares and crossroads where there is extra scope for accidents, the PTZ cameras have been preferred and are allowing management to track and zoom in on targets to acquire facial and license plate data. By contrast, the fixed cameras provide video of simple traffic flow scenes and everyday pedestrian movement for retrospective playback and retrieval.

Confronted on the ground with the client’s demands for image clarity, Hikvision used an HD-SDI interface in preference to the regular CVBS approach, combined with optic fibre for minimal delay. Police and facility managers can therefore exercise PTZ control from the back end with nominal time lag, the delay being less than 250 milliseconds.

An underlying concept of the Expo is the ability of exhibiting nations to achieve better living conditions for their populations and more sustainable urban environments. Sub themes include the blending of diverse cultures, promotion of economic prosperity, scientific innovation and remodelling of city communities. The interaction between urban and rural areas is also discussed in many pavilions. Expo 2010 Shanghai China is the third largest even in the world in terms of economic and cultural impact, eclipsed only by the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games.

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 who strives constantly for improvement.”

He continued: “The experience we drew on during this project, combined with R & D capability, allowed us to respond to a demanding brief. The installation demonstrates the lengths Hikvision will go to in order to address customers’ needs at infrastructure sites of this kind.”

In the past, major world trade expos have demonstrated inventions ranging from electric lighting to ice cream cones. The focuses of the Expo are diplomacy, commerce, technical innovation and cultural awareness, themes that have dominated trade fairs since London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Above all, post-industrial nations are promoting their ecological credentials.

For more information please visit Hikvision’s website at www.hikvision.com

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