Liverpool John Lennon Airport pioneers industry-first computer vision technology for kerb to gate insight

2023 has seen the recovery in air travel continue strongly. Paul Staples, Director Airport Operations at Liverpool John Lennon Airport tells Computing how an AI powered solution is enhancing operations and increasing commercial revenues.

With the possible exception of those who enjoy it being socially acceptable to drink alcohol at 7am, airports tend not to be the highlight of anyone's holiday. The vast majority of travellers want to get through them as quickly as possible. Airports need to ensure a frictionless flow of passengers at every stage of their journey from kerb to gate. Paul Staples, Director, Airport Operations at Liverpool John Lennon Airport, describes the many ways that he has tried to track the flow of passengers to avoid bottlenecks and disruption to journeys.

"Over 12 or 13 years, I've literally tried every system out there," he says. "I've done everything from tracking somebody in a brightly coloured hat in a queue to see how long they take to get through a process, moving to Bluetooth systems, Wi-Fi systems, then moved on to LiDAR that you can install into a roof point and then track people as they move through. None of those things really hit the spot."

AeroCloud Systems then got in touch with Staples with an interesting proposition.

AeroCloud wanted to work in partnership with Liverpool John Lennon and another airport in the US to pilot the product before launching it to market (which it has now done in the form of AeroCloud Optic.) After more than a decade of challenges, Staples was happy to do so and several trials were set.

"We looked at things like headcount. So headcount is key to us in certain areas such as fire exits. We were able to tell how many people we have in a particular area. We can do that headcount using the cameras and then notify duty teams when numbers are starting to reach peaks. We are using it to look at the back end to the front end of security point to point. There were three or four trials that we ran in the early stages. I gave AeroCloud about eight metrics to begin with and to date they've solved maybe six or seven of those metrics quite convincingly."

The sample rate of the AeroCloud Optic is what really distinguished the solution from those which preceded it.

"With Bluetooth and Wi-Fi the sample rate was quite low. We were seeing anything from 5 - 15% passenger count, whereas AeroCloud allows us to see about 80% so it counts pretty much everybody that passes by a camera very accurately."

This accuracy has given Staples and his team some excellent insights into the day-to-day operations of the airport. In addition to being able to react quicker when they spot a potential problem, the solution has also allowed them to anticipate likely problems and head them off before the queues begin to build.

"We know now there are some groups of people that typically turn up earlier for flights than others. For example, people from certain Nordic countries typically show up three hours before a flight whereas British people tend to leave it later. That allows us to negotiate with our stakeholders to say that there's value for us in them opening a check-in desk an hour earlier for these nationalities, because we know that the sooner we open check-in the sooner we can get them through to security. We can flatten the peak in security so we can get passengers through quicker to where they are of value to us in shops and food and beverage outlets."

Allaying privacy concerns and boosting revenue

Airports are some of the highest security environments that the civilian population regularly accesses, and there are some very good reasons for that. However, for as long as AI and ML driven facial and behavioural recognition systems have been deployed in video surveillance systems, people have been expressing concerns about the accuracy of those systems, particularly among Black ethnic groups. Generalised concerns around privacy and consent persist.

It is important to note that this is not security software, and the key to allaying privacy concerns about this solution is that it can track people anonymously.

"The algorithm is unable to uniquely identify somebody," Staples explains. "We have exactly the same CCTV as we had before, but now we have a tool that enables us to learn that anybody who turns up and goes via gate X, on average the time taken to get to that gate was 56 minutes. If that gate is the gate for Amsterdam we know that people turning up for Amsterdam flights have a dwell of 56 minutes. I can't identify you personally. In terms of privacy, I've got no unique data to deal with. I've got aggregate data, based on destination or based on a group of people that came through the building at the same time."

The AeroCloud system does not collect or store data at an individual level. Operations performance managers and business analysts access the system via dashboards.

"They can pick a gate, look at the number of people that went though, work out how long they spend at security on average and know that they showed up at the front door two hours before the departure time. That's the data that we're able to use. There is no individual data. I couldn't go back with a photograph of an individual and see what they did."

That said, as every social media company knows, aggregated data can be extremely valuable. Let's track back to that hypothetical gate.

"It's useful for us to know if a group of people spend more time in World Duty Free or in food and beverage. If they spend more time in World Duty Free we can start to use digital marketing to drive them towards the products we know they're most likely to buy.

If we know the time of day that a majority of passengers for that gate are passing digital signs before they get to security we can advertise things that are most likely to be of interest to them in World Duty Free."

Whilst Staples says it's very early days with the digital marketing idea he does say that that commercial revenues have already increased because his team have been able to increase dwell time post security by flattening demand peaks.

Even at Liverpool John Lennon Airport it remains unlikely that passengers will enjoy their airport experience as much as their actual holiday, but at least they won't have to queue for as long to be on their way.