Proving compliance with planning conditions of new warehouse location
An expansion of the Whitehill & Bordon Regeneration Company’s (WBRC) large warehousing site came with strict planning conditions on road use. The company rose to the challenge by employing Axis technology to monitor traffic with immediate results.
An expanding town with historic constraints
Once home to the British Army’s Defence School of Electronic and Mechanical Engineering, Bordon – along with its contiguous villages, Whitehill and Lindford – saw extensive town growth after the Army relocated in 2015. The initial efforts of the WBRC drew many businesses to the area, including a major board game distributor. When the distributor’s business tripled during Covid-19, a new four-storey football field-sized warehouse was required, to be built from scratch on a new stretch of land.
The site, a short hop from the company’s original Borden location, was perfect, but its road access proved contentious. To the east, a major branch road acts as the main entrance and exit of the new warehouse, allowing straightforward access for HGVs, vans, and the cars and coaches which deliver staff to the site. To the west, lies a narrower, mainly residential street. The two roads are connected by a minor link road for which WBRC is responsible.
Hampshire County Council was keen to avoid overloading the narrower residential road, which has proved attractive to road users as a short cut. As a result, it imposed planning restrictions around the flow of traffic – in particular, at the junction where the link and residential roads meet - as a condition of consent for the new warehouse. The restrictions prohibited left turns onto the western route, and detailed time constraints around the hours company staff would be allowed to use it.
WBRC worked with its warehouse tenant on a solution which could prove that these planning restrictions were being met. It approached Axis partner NW Security Group – with whom it had already collaborated on the town’s world-class smart city security network – to help create it.
Defeating challenging conditions
Frank Crouwel, Managing Director at NW Security Group, lays out the plan. “The solution had to be camera-based because WBRC was not only looking to count the number of vehicles, but also to collect information about them. They needed an accurate way to track how many cars had entered the junction, how many had exited, how many had turned left, and the kind of vehicles that had passed in all directions. For such a simple-seeming project, this was quite the challenge.”
NW Security Group’s efforts were hampered by the layout of the site surrounding the junction, which borders footpaths and woodland – this limited the eventual solution to use just two cameras mounted on a single pole. And not just any cameras would do, as Frank Crouwel explains: “The desire for accuracy and, in particular, the need to monitor the junction’s use at night meant we needed cameras which could cope with all conditions and light levels. Thus, we opted to deploy the AXIS P1465-LE Bullet Camera, a unit we knew to be reliable and offer excellent image quality.”
It was vital that we had cameras with the right optics, focus, and the ability to deal with different lighting conditions, and we got them with the AXIS P1465-LE. The solution worked exactly as we’d hoped, provided everything we hoped to achieve, and offered very high accuracy.
Operating accurately at all hours
The AXIS P1465-LE incorporates numerous smart features including Lightfinder 2.0, which enables it to operate in extremely low light conditions and eliminates the need for additional illumination on the camera pole. WBRC’s technical project manager Chris Manning is enthusiastic about the results. “The nighttime performance of the Axis camera is just unbelievable,” he says. “There’s no difference in accuracy. It has the same technical capability during the night as it does during the day. It was vital that we had cameras with the right optics, focus, and the ability to deal with different lighting conditions, and we got them.”
Low-light performance was not the only reason the AXIS P1465-LE was chosen – the solution also demanded number plate recognition, helping to match individual vehicles against a list provided by the site’s tenant and identifying those vehicles which were breaching planning conditions. For this, NW Security Group reached out to OCR technology experts NVA Video Analytics who provided an application called Vaxtor – an on-camera software solution which could take advantage of the camera’s deep learning and analytics functions.
Benefits of working in-camera
“The camera does, basically, everything,” says Frank Graham, Head of Sales at NVA Video Analytics. “It uses our embedded OCR engine to identify the lettering of the plate then works outwards from there, leveraging analytical algorithms to identify the type of vehicle the plate is attached to. This particular system doesn’t use a lookup or connect to the DVLA – it is smart enough to determine the vehicle category by itself. The only processing done off-camera is collation and archiving of statistics; this kind of camera-based system would not be possible without the edge processing power that Axis cameras provide.”
The software side was not all plain sailing. The sharp angle of the left turn from the site forced drivers to swing out to the right side of the road at an angle; this, combined with the difficult position of the camera, made detecting left turns difficult. NW Security Group engineers created a solution which identified a region of interest in the camera’s vision but found that the accuracy of Axis cameras was such that it would also detect passing traffic. By implementing a detection limit whereby vehicles would have to be recognized in multiple subsequent frames – thus logging only slower-moving vehicles – and specifically looking to detect number plates presented to the camera at an angle which would suggest turning, the system was able to effectively filter out all false positives.
Short-term project, immediate results
WBRC’s Chris Manning says the results were exactly what the company had hoped for. “This is a front-loaded exercise,” he says, “because the success rate isn’t determined by looking at what’s happened after 12 months. It had to be immediate. And as soon as the cameras were installed, we were able to gather the information we needed, in the first month, capturing a particular HGV breaching the conditions. We were able to pass its number plate to our tenant, who explained the rules to the driver who now adheres to the requirement.”
“WBRC is reassured that a relatively simple solution using minimal cameras and user-friendly interface is working exactly as hoped, providing images and data for every vehicle that passes, day or night, with very high accuracy - everything we hoped to achieve - and with the evidence to back it up. The planning condition should be discharged after a year in operation, at which time we will be looking to see where else WBRC can implement this excellent standalone system."
Products & solutions
Solutions by industry
Our partner organizations
Get in touch
Want to know how you can benefit from Axis solutions? Get in touch and we will help you.
Contact us