The SDIS 13 Marseille uses Matrox Mura PMX to manage Sony cameras and speed up their interventions

The SDIS Fire And Rescue Emergency Call Response Center 13 (Departmental Fire and Relief Service), located in the French town of Marseille, has selected Matrox Mura MPX technology to capture and display multiple video sources from Sony video surveillance cameras in two NEC Display videowalls, managed with Agelec's control software, designer and integrator of this project.

With the aim of streamlining its actions and monitoring with high quality the interventions and operations underway in the extensive urban area of Marseille, the fire and rescue department of Bocas del Rhone (SDIS 13) in this French town has opted for audiovisual solutions in videowall configuration for its emergency call response center.

This regional command centre oversees the operations of 62 fire stations that serve in much of the world's 5.087 Km2 extension of Bocas del Rhone in Marseille. Due to the growing stream of real-time video and data received at the emergency call response center, SDIS managers 13 needed a solution capable of managing key information in order to respond quickly during field interventions.

For this project, the department selected the AV specialist Agelec to design and integrate two new videowall into your emergency call response center "to facilitate decision-making," explains Didier Margotto, SDIS commander 13 and responsible for this centre-. We wanted a large video wall in our action room to oversee ongoing interventions and operations and a smaller one in our observation room to focus on critical issues or manage additional crisis situations".

The SDIS 13 opted for the new large LCD screens with ultra-thin panels of the model of 50 X551UN inches of NEC Display. The installation of the control room required a custom support structure for these screens to be mounted in a small space, provided by Agelec.

Camera viewing and mapping

In addition, the chosen videowall processing solution had to capture and visualize a wide variety of video sources on both display systems. Source content could include recordings of firefighters' fire detection cameras, HD videos of forest aerial surveillance devices and IP domes Sony, as well as video conferences.

Another requirement was that TV tuning input would offer the latest news and other updates. Météo Plus weather maps and mappings showing physical characteristics and road access would also be shown. Access to hundreds of Internet resources, private virtual network data and videos from remote computers should also be easy.

Not forgetting the dedicated software tools of the SDIS 13: automatic fire detection systems; alerts and sending response teams; fire assessment and monitoring; operations management; creating 2D/3D maps; Geolocation, Etc.

SDIS managers 13 evaluated the various options that met their needs and selected Agelec's AGCWall video wall processors, incorporating Matrox Graphics Mura MPX PCIe cards to capture and view high-quality video and data from multiple sources in real time.

As Jean-Michel Lanco points out, CEO of Agelec, "we appreciate the flexibility of having both inputs and outputs on a single Mura MPX card, as well as the large number of formats they support. The performance of these Matrox cards is very high and easy to install, in addition to being fully compatible with our AGCTouch software and that is why we have used them with great success in many videowall projects with multiple video inputs and outputs".

The main video wall consists of 12 Screens (in configuration 4×3) 50" of NEC Display's X551UN model and the smallest by 5 displays of the same model in configuration 2×2. For Lanco, "THE NEC screens chosen for this project are designed with ultra-narrow panels (5,7 mm from content to content) and higher reading quality than systems of that size of the competition".

Monitoring and management

Videowall processors are located in an equipment room behind the screens, along with some of the sources directly connected to Mura MPX cards. Additional resources outside this space are connected to the visual system processor using CAT6 extenders.

The SDIS 13 controls the layout of videowalls using a custom version of Agelec's AGCTouch software that runs on touchscreens. With so many video sources to monitor, managing these systems is paramount, and this software provides an easy way for center staff to place, modify and expand the different contents using a 32" screen, to control smaller videowall, and another 46" for the main.

As the SDIS commander points out 13 and responsible for the emergency call center, Didier Margotto, “Matrox Mura MPX input/output cards offer universal input compatibility, which is important, given the variety of base bands and IP sources we wanted to show on our video murals. Agelec's videowall solution with Matrox Mura MPX inside and NEC displays helps us monitor growing video and data input in real time, so that we can make decisions with more information and faster in interventions where time is crucial. We are delighted with the results”.

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