Florence Tracks Tourism Using Thermal Cameras & IoT Platforms

A U .S. tourist is making headlines after causing $26 ,000 in damage for throwing a scooter down Rome's Spanish steppes. It's clear that while tourism could be a massive boost to the local economy, it can also strain local resources and possibly put some of the most treasured historic sites at risk. But the right combination of data sensors and IoT platforms can change that, as seen in Florence, Italy. This is the main square of Florence, known as the Piazza della Signoria. It's been the center of the political life in Florence since the 14th century, featuring some of the city's richest collections of art and history. And for that reason, the site attracts around 4 million visitors each year. We have an agreement with the Florence municipality. What they are looking for is... is a consistent data regarding what is going on. So trends and numbers and anomalies. Paolo Nessi is a coordinator at Snap4City. Snap4City is an IoT platform that collects and analyzes data from smart city sensors. The platform is powered by FeeWare technology, which provides a framework for open source capabilities. That has enabled Snap4City to customize a solution for a city. fully connecting all management and control domains into one platform. In the city of Florence, Snapper City serves as the foundation of its smart city control The platform presents data related to mobility, the environment, social media and pedestrian flows. About four years ago, Florence integrated Snapper City into its management of Piazza della Signoria as part of the Herit Data Project. That project studied pedestrian data from major tourist sites with the goal to develop that better manage the crowds in this case we are already collected from the Flores municipality data coming from the Wi -Fi so counting people understanding how they move where they go what they do and so but today the limitation of those solution is mainly the problems in understanding how the people move in what what is going to happen when you have a large amount of people in a square and where they go how much they stay fixed in front of the major building so for doing that we we approached the the idea of using the thermal cameras for access the thermal technology has recently developed a lot both in terms of available resolution but also in the availability of wide lenses. So basically, with a limited number of cameras, it's now possible to monitor pretty wide square. According to Axis' Andrea Sori, the Florence project marks one of the first instances in which thermal cameras has been paired with an IoT platform. And he expects that trend to continue, while the cameras are still more expensive, about two to three times the cost than an IT camera. the cost is declining and at the same time the technology is becoming more dependable and especially useful for public spaces there are hundreds of tv cameras in florence for security but those cameras are not suitable for tracking and understanding the flows before gdpr experts while this camera camera can really be used for tracking and counting in a safe manner. Florence will deploy as many as eight cameras in this square. The cameras will use Snapper City software to count the people. The cameras will send their data to the platform using 4G or DSL. And unlike other cameras, they can operate even in low bandwidth situations because they include edge computing. Cameras are historically quite demanding in terms of bandwidth. So the fact that we can then stream only data or events when it's needed to trigger by something that happens is detected at the edge, optimize the streaming, which means that if we have fiber available, that's the best scenario. If we are, for instance, in a historical city center where pulling cable is extremely expensive or even not possible, then we can leverage on wireless connectivity. And in the very severe condition, we can also have very low bandwidth, so edge computing really brings a lot of benefits there. Once the data lands in the Snap for City platform, the findings are presented through dashboards to the city. Those dashboards will also integrate trends from social media related to that tour site. It searches for keywords on Twitter, for example. Then it uses analytics. The platform will relay future trends so the worker can view how many people are currently on the scene. and how many could be there in a few hours. This data will help Florence to better manage the city's services like waste collection or security resources. Florence has also integrated this information into its tour staff, which tourists use to plan their travels. And through Snap4City, Florence can follow trends at other tour sites connected to the Herit Data Project. The EU pilot project consisted of six pilot sites, including Florence. It was all made possible through 4.2. million euros in funding. The cost for installing a food system is quite high because you can imagine that if you need to set up for a city like Florence is quite high. If you have a small city for instance 100 inhabitants as we have done many other times to it. is it could be close to 100 000 euros for setting up the system without the cost for the sensors there is a strong demand for this integrated integrated system for aggregating data and providing decision support for especially for monitoring the city and reacting in real time. Meanwhile, AXIS's Andrea Soria expects his project to be the tipping point for future smart city applications using the thermal cameras. Another sign of IoT applications becoming highly interconnected. So maybe we can start today with people, but then we want to cover also detection of bikes and vehicles, and then maybe also fire detection for safety proposed. And then we can also connect that sensor with other sensors, for instance, with air quality sensors, so that we can correlate the data coming from the air quality with the presence of people. Or we can connect the presence of people with the dimming of the street lighting and improve the user experience. And we see that everything is very much interconnected. So that's a look at the latest ways that thermal cameras are gaining traction in cities, especially in cities. when they're paired with IoT platforms. It'll be interesting to see how this project in Florence can come to influence other testing sites a part of this greater project. For more coverage be sure to stick with Current Insights.