With its groundbreaking Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) systems, OptaSense has been selected by governments worldwide to provide critical protection to important airports and other strategic sites at multiple locations.
A nation’s airports are an essential part of its infrastructure that helps underpin the economy, playing a role in its critical communications and cargo backbone. Airports help maintain and develop economic growth, and demand the most stringent security measures. There is no room for error.
Comprehensive airport security measures
As such they require a comprehensive range of security measures that go beyond conventional protection to embrace cost-effective transformational technology that can monitor and even prevent events before they occur.
Following extensive development and evaluation, OptaSense is a proven technology that is consistently selected for:
- Complete system robustness and reliability, but relative ease of deployment
- Exceptional responsiveness and immediate classification capability, with very low false alarm rates
- Economic post-installation operation and ability to complement other security technologies
The company’s technology is designed to detect, classify and locate events around airport perimeters. It does this accurately and early enough to enable corrective action to be put in place to prevent intrusion, damage, harm, or interruption.
Full monitoring of airport staff, motorways and assets
DAS technology turns standard fibre-optic cable into thousands of virtual microphones; enabling full monitoring of staff, motorways, roads, physical assets and to help prevent cable theft and other intrusions.
OptaSense boosts decision-making to keep airports safe, secure and operating economically. Real-time DAS technology can help prevent incidents before they occur and, by using alread-laid fibre, does so cost-effectively.
The OptaSense system converts a standard single-mode fibre-optic cable (often the same cable used for communications or CCTV) into an array of virtual microphones. A highly stable laser is pulsed at 10,000 times a second and the Rayleigh backscatter is monitored for signs of ‘excitement’ within the fibre molecules. These are monitored simultaneously to provide an acoustic fingerprint of any activity along the fibre length.
Managing real-time threats to to airport perimeters
This ground-breaking technology enables airport security teams to dynamically manage real-time threats to perimeter integrity before they occur, and significantly enhances existing security measures by delivering highly sensitive trigger alerts around the entire airport perimeter.
Fibre-optic cables are turned into highly-sensitive microphones, which are anle to distinguish between human and animal footsteps, OptaSense provides centralised information, creating immediate alerts, improved responses and informed decision making. As a comprehensive security and monitoring solution OptaSense offers:
- Day and night all-weather resilience and operation
- Above and below ground (fence-mounted and buried) and water sensing capability
- Early warning and classification prior to events
- Range and range-performance independent; no degeneration over distance
- Cover for access roads and areas beyond immediate site
- A solution that is highly resistant to disablement, spoofing or interruption
- One or two-system solution for entire site and access routes with no sensitive electronic equipment in the field
- Ultra-low maintenance burden and cost
- Invisible and pervasive
- Real-time intelligence direct to customers hands
- Very low false and nuisance alarm rates; a key problem with other solutions
- Proven high-security installations protecting national infrastructure
Airport perimeter security solutions
OptaSense’s airport perimeter security solution can use new or existing standard fibre-optic cable with nothing more than the fibre in the field.
The solution can further be tailored to meet local environments’ needs and complements other security technologies such as CCTV, UAVs and ground security staff.