Our clients, WSP, Kier and Highways England, are using our innovative 3D ‘world management’ system, AssetScape, to assess the suitability of proposed CCTV camera sites, eliminating the need for costly and dangerous site visits.
Figure 1: AssetScape’s 3D world
Configuring the 3D world
Our clients require a highly accurate 3D representation of the real world to enable them to identify obstructions, such as trees, structures and buildings, that may obscure a camera’s field of vision. To create this, we exploit a range of resources including:
- LiDAR (mobile and aerial) – used to represent obstructions such as trees, structures and vegetation. The point cloud is refined and processed to remove extraneous points
- OS Mastermaps – buildings are automatically extruded and positioned in the 3D world
- Orthographic imagery
- Google Streetview
- AssetScape’s 3D terrain maps
‘Line of Sight’ module
To meet the project’s requirements an innovative ‘Line of Sight’ module has been developed. Features include:
- Asset templates to allow users to easily create and experiment with different camera types and settings
- Dynamically interactive camera assets that a user can operate as they would a camera in the real world
Figure 2: Camera asset and its field of vision cone
Figure 3: A Polar Image and its associated statistics
- The ‘Polar Image’ which provides sophisticated insights into any feature or asset that falls within a camera’s field of vision, such as percentage visibility, percentage screen height and total depth:
- Regions which centre on each proposed camera site, allowing users to navigate around the AssetScape world with ease.
Usability
AssetScape’s intuitive and user-friendly interface means that with only a few hours of training users from Kier, who had never used AssetScape before, were beginning their site suitability assessments.