The Las Vegas Sands Casino in Macau was the first substantial casino in Asia when it opened in May 2004. Built in the style of the well-known leisure centres of Las Vegas in the United States, Sands Casino comprises a leisure complex, various restaurants and bars and plentiful gambling opportunities within a stunning architectural setting.

In 2005, the Sands Casino wanted to double its capacity, and Dallmeier electronic was asked to extend the video surveillance system it first installed when the casino was built. The result is the world’s largest digital surveillance system.

But why has this expansion become necessary, only a year after the official opening? The casino managers pretty soon realised that the restaurant provision was too large for the demand. The restaurants were not as popular as expected - apparently Asians are keener on gambling than on fine food. So consequently a portion of the restaurant footage was converted into additional casino area.

Dallmeier’s security solution for the Las Vegas Sands Casino combines full resolution surveillance within a digital matrix environment to provide comprehensive coverage whilst ensuring ease of management. The result is total customer satisfaction and security.

System design
The Dallmeier solution for Sands Casino – comprising hardware, software, monitoring and transmission components - provides full resolution, real time, 24 hour surveillance: an essential requirement for all casino environments.

Central to the design of the Dallmeier solution is the principle of decentralised recording. This achieves best data security and availability as well as cost effectiveness. According to the management of Sands Casino, Dallmeier’s decentralised archiving solution with virtual matrix functionality offered considerable savings in relation to peripherals and network components, and offered more economic and secure archiving. Comparing the centralised with the decentralised recording system solutions, the cost advantage is about 3:1 because of the significantly higher resources required for storage, network and failsafe reliability within a centralised recording solution.

System overview
The complete system comprises fixed cameras and PTZ (dome) cameras monitoring the casino, restaurant and hotel. Decentralised recording is on to over 2,000 DIS-1/S streaming servers (digital video recorders) using the MPEG-2 compression format.

Recorded data is written to two hard disks (per DVR) by mirrored recording. The standard hard disk stores seven days recording, whilst the second hard disk stores a single day’s data and acts as an emergency back up. The current day’s data are therefore always available if the standard hard disk were to fail. A second security feature is the storage of the operating system on a separate Flash ROM chip so that it runs independently from the hard disks. If they both fail then the DIS-1 is still able to deliver video pictures by streaming them to the security workstations.

Management
Camera management as well as image transmission, recording and analysis is achieved using a digital virtual matrix comprising 100 decoders. Each workstation consists of a surveillance PC and an average of three monitors with a casino graphical user interface featuring Dallmeier’s PView management software. An integral site plan offers a further graphical interface. Security operators have a choice of using the keyboard with joystick and/or jog shuttle for camera management, camera switching and image analysis. 

The system saves presets for complete management of PTZ dome cameras and delivers a latency of less than 200ms over the network.

The DIS-1/S DVR facilitates very precise monitoring of the casino table environment with highly efficient search and replay tools. There is no discernible difference between the quality of live and recorded images.

High flexibility
The fully digital surveillance system with virtual matrix function like the one being installed in the Las Vegas Sands Casino in Macau is suitable for all kinds of applications and large projects thanks to its high flexibility and individual customisation for operation and control.