Energy / Critical Infrastructure Security
Cutting Nuisance Alarms by 94% at Unmanned Sites
Background
A distribution network operator ran motion-triggered cameras at 60 unmanned substations. Vegetation, rain, spiders on the lens and kangaroos generated so many alerts that the monitoring contractor had effectively stopped acting on them — a textbook alarm-fatigue failure at sites that genuinely needed watching.
The problem
Backhaul at most sites was metered LTE, so streaming video to a central analytics service was neither affordable nor reliable. Any classifier had to run on the existing pole-mounted power budget, tolerate 50 °C enclosure temperatures through summer, and be conservative in the one direction that matters: a missed genuine intrusion is far more costly than an extra false positive.
Approach
We retrofitted each site with a compact edge unit — a Hailo-8 accelerator alongside the existing ONVIF camera — running person, vehicle and animal detection locally at 12 fps. Classification decides whether anything leaves the site at all: animal and vegetation events are counted and discarded, while person or vehicle detections push a short clip and a structured event over MQTT. We deliberately tuned the operating point toward recall, accepting more false positives than a balanced model would, because the operator's cost asymmetry demanded it. A weekly summary of discarded events lets the operator audit what the classifier is suppressing rather than trusting it blindly.
Outcome
Nuisance alerts fell 94% across the fleet, and the monitoring contractor resumed acting on every alert that arrived. Backhaul data dropped from roughly 40 GB to 1.2 GB per site per month, which paid back the retrofit hardware inside fourteen months on data charges alone. No genuine intrusion in the twelve-month validation period was suppressed.
Our role
Edge unit selection and enclosure thermal design; detector tuning; MQTT event pipeline; fleet rollout across 60 sites.
Technologies
Gallery
Figure 1 — Detection overlay.
Figure 2 — Pole-mounted edge unit opened to show the accelerator module and LTE modem..
Figure 3 — Before/after alert volume chart across the 60-site fleet..
Figure 4 — Weekly audit view listing suppressed event categories with sample thumbnails..
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