Orlando International Airport uses lidar-based crowd analytics to maximise safety

Orlando International Airport is using lidar-based, real-time crowd analytics technology to maximise safety at its terminals during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Foot traffic monitoring specialist The Indoor Lab partnered with lidar company Cepton to provide the solution.

Called Safe Place, it uses Cepton’s Helius smart lidar system. Helius enables The Indoor Lab to provide intelligent, anonymised, 3D tracking of people and claims to improve the usability, safety and cleanliness of large spaces.

Analytics partner

The project at Orlando International Airport is one of several early projects initiated by The Indoor Lab and Cepton as part of a strategic partnership. The Indoor Lab is Cepton’s early-stage development and analytics partner. As well as aiming to enable more efficient design of public and private commercial spaces, the partnership seeks to provide a capability to improve public safety during the pandemic and recovery.

“We have a 15-year history of crowd tracking across retail, events, airports, and stadiums,” said Patrick Blattner, co-founder and chief product officer of The Indoor Lab. “So, when Covid-19 started spreading exponentially and negatively affected many public and private spaces, we consulted with leaders involved in drafting proposals for the International Franchise Association, including the use of lidar technology to help put the country back on a path towards normalcy.

“With public concerns focused on cleanliness of public and commercial spaces, we extended our Safe Place platform beyond occupancy and social distancing, creating the first proprietary real-time sanitisation detection solution in the market. A Safe Place enabled environment ensures locations have been cleaned, distancing measures are followed, and safer occupancy levels are maintained. Our partnership with Cepton helped us deliver against this promise.”

“With public concerns focused on cleanliness of public and commercial spaces, we extended our Safe Place platform beyond occupancy and social distancing, creating the first proprietary real-time sanitisation detection solution”

According to The Indoor Lab, the full solution implemented in Orlando led to a significant improvement in people’s adherence to social distancing through Thanksgiving and into the busy holiday travel season.

The effectiveness of The Indoor Lab’s innovative crowd analytics solution reportedly relies on the high point density and detection range of Cepton’s MMT-based Vista-series lidars and its Helius system that provides object dimensions, locations and velocities at high accuracy.

In addition, Helius allows easy aggregation of data from multiple Cepton lidar sensors to form a comprehensive and extendable network for tracking. For instance, this allows the anonymised tracking of the same person across large overlapping areas.

In the Orlando International Airport deployment, the Indoor Lab used seven Vista lidar sensors from Cepton to cover nearly 100 per cent of the terminal area of roughly 50,000 square feet.

Cepton will be showcasing its lidar solutions at the CES 2021 electronics event which is taking place online this year from 11-14 January.

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