Porto is home to one of Portugal’s most important art and architecture foundations, the Serralves Foundation, which governs the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art and Serralves Park. Both are National Monuments, Portugal’s most important heritage classification.

Over the past years, the Serralves Museum has become Portugal’s most popular museum: visitors now exceed 300,000 per year. They are drawn by world-class cultural events such as a recent exhibition of Spanish artist Joan Miro. Many of the more than 80 works had never before been shown publicly. With such high visitor numbers, the Serralves Foundation searched for support in managing their visitor flow. Administrators wanted to identify high- and low-traffic days, so they could adjust staffing levels and thereby prevent long queues at entrances and dangerous overcrowding of exhibition rooms.

Bosch supported the Foundation by installing FLEXIDOME IP panoramic 7000 video cameras inside and outside the museum. Then the cameras were connected to the Bosch Remote Portal.  

The cameras provide a complete 360-degree view of a certain scene without blind spots. Thanks to their built-in video analytics function, the panoramic cameras are able to interpret what they see. In this way they not only capture and transmit video images, but they can also transmit associated data, like object type, size, speed and much more. Remote Portal is a software-as-a-service that allows installers to access via the cloud any Bosch IP camera to configure applications, monitor the health status of the camera or set up camera counter reports.

Thus, this solution enables the Museum’s administration to count visitors — and report the count in real time. The Remote Portal allows for the creation of visitor traffic reports over a day, a week or several months. All data can be easily exported to other applications.

With the help of this information, the Serralves Foundation plans and relocates staffing as well as other resources well in advance. Security guards can manage visitor traffic over the course of the year, so all visitors can indulge fully in experiencing fine art — rather than the art of being stuck in a crowd.