How Elisa and Fyma are helping Helsinki Port Authority make sense of its traffic flows

One of the longer collaborations we have is with Elisa Finland and together we have been helping the Helsinki Port Authority make sense of its traffic flows. This is a large commercial port handling When we started working on this, the first thing to tackle was access to cameras.

Phones instead of cameras

Not every site we work with has connected cameras readily available – so Elisa came up with a solution where they’ve placed 5G Android phones inside weatherproof and heated 3D printed cases, so all that is needed for installation is access to power, which is usually readily available from existing lamp posts. This makes the solution really easy to install and maintain, especially as the pricing model for these devices is a leasing fee rather than the client having to purchase the cameras outright, therefore all the maintenance, connection and streaming fees are included in one deal.

The port is monitoring through traffic 24/7, classifying this to understand HGV’s and smaller vehicles as well as pedestrian footfall into the terminal building as this is something the port access systems are unable to capture. Data is streamed over cellular network, with the end client accessing this via Fyma’s online dashboard.

Because of its geographical location, the Finnish capital gets pretty extreme weather all year round, with nearly 24/7 sunlight in the summer and near darkness all through the day in winter. Additionally, it gets very cold in winter. The camera devices can stand extreme weather and temperatures (-10C and below), with Fyma algorithms trained in these conditions: rain, fog, sleet, snow, darkness, glares and halos have all been factored into datasets to maintain high levels of accuracy.

Benefit to the port?

The solution was easy to install, with a very light-touch approach, requiring minimal technical and procurement related work, so the port could get the project up and running in a month as opposed to the much longer deployments of other similar projects. The port now gets detailed insight to understand traffic flows, modal share and handle crowd management.

Additionally, the project kicked off further use cases once the benefits of computer vision were clear to the client, with Fyma now working with analytics from drones, analysing where shipping containers are inside the port area and understanding how a level crossing inside the port is affecting vehicle onboarding and offboarding times from ships – we’ll be writing about those case studies once projects are complete.

The camera setup Elisa created with phones and 3D printed cases work both indoors and outdoors, with indoor solution more lightweight as it doesn’t need heating (and hence price is also cheaper for this). The leasing structure means clients don’t need to purchase any devices, everything is incorporated into a single service fee instead.