Orlando International Airport is an international public airport located six miles outside of downtown Orlando, Florida. In 2019, it handled 50,613,072 passengers, making it one of the 10 busiest airports in the United States.

To help the airport maintain safety and cleanliness, maintain visual analytics of foot traffic and manage crowds amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Orlando International Airport (MCO), deployed real-time crowd analytics. Deployed by The Indoor Lab, a provider for monitoring real-time foot traffic using lidar sensors, the solution - called Safe Place - uses Cepton’s Helius Smart Lidar System.

The lidar system enables The Indoor Lab and the airport to provide intelligent, anonymized, 3D tracking of people, thereby dramatically improving the usability, safety and cleanliness of large spaces. Further, The Indoor Lab’s visual analytics platform, leveraging the Helius Smart Lidar System, powers the Synect Evenflow Crowd Radar media lights in terminal 2 of the Orlando airport.

According to The Indoor Lab, the full solution implemented in Orlando led to an improvement in people’s adherence to social distancing through Thanksgiving and into the busy holiday travel season. The effectiveness of the crowd analytics solution relies on the high point density and detection range of the solution's lidars and the system that provides object dimensions, locations and velocities at high accuracy. In addition, Helius allows easy aggregation of data from multiple Cepton lidar sensors to form a comprehensive and extendable network for seamless tracking. This, for example, allows the anonymized tracking of the same person across large overlapping areas.

In the Orlando International Airport deployment, the Indoor Lab uses seven Vista lidar sensors from Cepton to cover nearly 100% of the terminal area of roughly 50,000 square feet, something that would otherwise have required significantly more video cameras, each consuming far more data and storage bandwidth compared to the lidars. Unlike some video cameras, lidars perform regardless of lighting conditions.