Dutch football team FC Dordrecht was newly promoted to The Eredivisie, the top Dutch football league. The club needed to upgrade its analogue cameras, which would not meet Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) standards for the league.
Jacques de Zeeuw, security officer at FC Dordrecht, said: “We wanted to record extremely high-quality images at all times, particularly in parts of the stadium with minimal light. We felt that moving from analogue to digital was the only way to achieve this.” The club sought cameras capable of offering facial recognition for a new stadium planned for 2016. The cameras selected had to be compatible with facial recognition software; and had to be able to monitor action on the field, in the stands and the car park; and identify the faces of fans in the stadium, so that the authorities could recognise any trouble-makers. After conversations with the installer, CNI Europe BV, the club selected VB-H41 pan tilt and zoom network cameras, from Canon. The PTZs with Smart Shade Control (SSC) improve visibility of foreground objects in bright back-lit scenes, helping the security team to identify contraband objects such as fireworks brought into the stadium, and identify faces. Due to the results already seen, the stadium is working on the police being able to monitor live images from the local police station. Jacques de Zeeuw said: “A team of five officers joins us at the club for every match to oversee the grounds in order to better protect our fans and players. The team regularly mentions the superior image quality, the image sharpness and the zoom capabilities that our new cameras can now provide.”
