ViNotion receives ITEA Award of Excellence for PS-CRIMSON

A one-look overview of the city in 5 seconds

ITEA Award of Excellence for PS-CRIMSON

Cities nowadays are digitalising more and more service like data gathering for mobility, safety and communication to citizens. This data is required to be able to govern an increasingly dynamic and complex city. However, authorities still need to tackle information fragmentation caused by a lack of common platforms, toolsets and separated data per department. The ITEA project PS-CRIMSON, a collaboration of six academic and industry partners from the Netherlands and Canada, developed a unique 3D smart digital model that combines all the gathered data on one common platform. With this platform, public safety and disaster management can be improved, as pilot projects in Eindhoven and Vancouver have shown. Today, PS-CRIMSON was awarded with the ITEA Award of Excellence, exceptionally in two categories being Exploitation and Unique business partnerships.

The PS-CRIMSON consortium delivers a platform that serves as a single-entry point for city representatives. It facilitates data collection, sharing, management, analysis and dissemination from public and private urban infrastructures and resources. The entire city gets a single-entry point to a Smart City platform instead of having different types of systems between different departments. It saves them a lot of time and money and gives them one view of all the data they are gathering, enabling them to combine them and act upon them quickly. A focus lays on the public safety and disaster management domains, where the platform’s benefits are extremely important.

Improving public safety and disaster management

The City of Eindhoven and Vancouver were involved from the start, providing input on the design and implementation. This resulted in two technology demonstrators in two use cases, focusing on public safety and disaster management. The following scenarios illustrate the possibilities:

For public safety, a city responsible for video-surveillance currently might need to monitor up to sixty live-screens in the control room. In addition, (s)he receives dozens of calls during the day from local citizens and officers regarding suspicious events. Thanks to the PS-CRIMSON results, this person could now work with one single screen and, once logged in, virtually walk through a 3D model of the city and see everything that is happening in a single view.

On the background, software is monitoring all city data and filters out relevant events that require attention. This pre-processed information allows the city representative to make split -second decisions, see connections between the different data, and most importantly, feel in control. For example, when someone sends a mobile picture to the police, the search engine can determine on 10-meter accuracy where the incident is taking place. Walking routes of pedestrians can be connected between cameras throughout the city centre. Both are using special AI image technology developed by Eindhoven University of Technology.

The west coast of Canada is vulnerable to the huge earthquake fault running down the coast. Always upgrading their plans to protect Vancouver, a city of 2.5 million, city officials worked with Esri Canada using the strata plans to create a 3D smart model. The PS-CRIMSON application and model showed the effect of an earthquake which was 6.9 on the Richter scale, on the densely populated downtown. The application and model simulated the different scenarios and enabled the city to predict and pre-assess the damage with a much greater level of detail and accuracy. No longer looking at a census block level over 5-10 buildings, now they could see the effect, down to the level of interior units in the damaged buildings, and then see the effect of the different level of flooding that would follow.

One team, one goal

The PS-CRIMSON partners show a unique complementarity in their collaboration; where Atos and Esri Canada offer the integrated platform, while ViNotion and Sorama are experts on sensoring, Esri Canada creates the digital twin city indoor modelling, Cyclomedia is responsible for the photo-realistic 3D texturing, and the Eindhoven University of Technology supports with innovative solutions on AI. Together they cover the full value chain for a Smart City solution, integrating the different silos of data and technology together in one common platform. In addition, with a number of the consortium partners a subsequent ITEA project called SMART has been set up. This clearly shows why they were the first to be awarded in the category of Unique business partnerships.

First commercial global successes

Thanks to offering of a complete Smart City solution valued by the cities, the project already has its first commercial successes; they won a tender for Smart City Hilversum, which is now being deployed and similar projects are being implemented in Canada, United States and China. They are now the first adopters of the PS-CRIMSON platform to share valuable public data among different departments.

PS-CRIMSON’s offer enables the platform’s users to detect suspicious situations, localise them, follow the subjects involved and intervene before escalation takes place. Thanks to the project’s world-class technology results, that can be extended to many other domains, this can now all be done with a high performance and accuracy which is two to three years ahead of market, making cities a better and safer place to live in!

More information: