Queensland Parks and Wildlife (QPWS) Case Study
Project Description
The Problem
Queensland National Parks in line with a government commitment to assist with emergency management and permit compliance, wanted to introduce a method to log the number of vehicles accessing the parks at Bribie Island and Cooloola together with an understanding of their permit compliance. The permits would need to be issued and then checked for validity, whilst reporting would offer the vehicle counts for the locations.
The problem was that checking the permits would be a highly manual process that required infrastructure, in the form of a checkpoint, and labour to issue and manually validate permits and log vehicle counts. The costs involved would either meant this was done at a loss or that the price of the permits would be extremely high to offset the costs. They needed an automated solution to make this work.
The Solution
Queensland National Parks set out to create a fully automated solution for the problem. Sensor Dynamics was contacted to provide a vehicle identification solution for the parks. Visitors can now buy a permit for these parks via the Parks websites. When they purchase the permit they enter their license plate details which are used as the identifier for the vehicle.
Sensor Dynamics built and deployed mobile systems that included LPR cameras and colour CCTV cameras. The unit at Cooloola also needed solar panels and battery as there was no local power available. The software and video storage all is hosted on the cloud and transmitted over 4G via a private VPN for security. The systems now checks every vehicle driving into the park against a whitelist. If the vehicle is not on the list then a report is generated and the vehicle is issued a fine.
Key Features
- 3 sites – Bribie Island, K’Gari (Fraser Island) and Cooloola
- Mobile LPR units
- Overview CCTV footage
- Solar and battery powered options
- Fines issued for vehicles without permits
- Fully automated solution
- Cloud hosted solution