Electrosonic Takes the Headache Out of Managing a Video Wall at Highways England Control Centre

The Highways England Eastern Regional Control Centre’s new dynamic display system is virtually maintenance free, energy efficient and suitable for 24/7 usage.

CI Staff
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When clients are looking to upgrade their display systems, they typically want the solution to be user-friendly and require little maintenance.

Thanks to Electrosonic, Highways England’s Eastern Regional Control Centre got just that with its new dynamic display system (DDS).

Located in South Mimms, Highways England Control Centre’s new DDS is comprised of 24, 67-inch LED illuminated ‘cubes’, and is virtually maintenance free, energy efficient and suitable for 24/7 usage.

PHOTOS: Inside Highways England’s South Mimms Control Centre

The South Mimms Control Centre is one of Highway England’s largest, and the Control Centre’s exisiting dynamic display system was in need of replacement as it had been installed years before. 

“The video wall is a key operational resource allowing for improved tactical and strategic management of congestion and incidents,” says Garry Packer, technology manager, Highways England, in an Electrosonic news release.

Electrosonic chose to install Mitsubishi Electric 67PE78, 67-inch SXGA+ LED illuminated ‘cubes’ for the new DDS, as the cubes are brighter, of higher resolution and use less power than the previous hardware. Additionally, the cubes do not require any consumables such as projector lamps that would need regular replacement.

According to Electrosonic, the cubes have a 4:3 aspect ratio that match the all-important camera images exactly, making the most efficient use of the display area. Their automatic color balancing feature ensures that all cubes in the array give a uniform performance.

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The cubes also benefit from an extremely narrow 1-mm bezel, which presents a virtually seamless image when magnified across a 2×2 cube array.

The DDS, which dominates the control room and consists of an 8×3 array of cubes, can show any combination of video or images across the array, determined by any one of the 20 operator positions.

The vast majority of images are derived from Highways England’s network of 870 cameras located around the regions roads. In addition, images from other regions, roadwork cameras, Transport for London and broadcast images can also be selected.

The display receives its inputs from an Eyevis Netpix NPX-4800 videowall processor. Electrosonic says this was chosen for its flexibility and capability of dealing with many source types. In particular, it met Highways England’s requirement that the processor should be able to process directly H264 compressed CCTV images delivered over IP, according to ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum) format.

Electrosonic says they maintain an on-going service relationship with various Highways England sites, having now successfully completed a total of eight projects for them.

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