Melbourne is planning to roll out a privately operated camera and 3D mapping sensor system to monitor crowds in the CBD on New Year’s Eve which could then be made permanent.
City of Melbourne Council has invited expressions of interest from suppliers in a tender notice that expires at 11am on Monday for a Crowd Intelligence Solution to “assist managing crowd density during large-scale events” and “longer-term permanent solutions for year-round use”.
The Solution must provide people counting, occupancy and density monitoring and real-time alerts, and tender documents highlight the potential use of LiDAR (3D mapping using lasers), cameras, thermal imaging, and stereo vision sensors.
The documents state that the Crowd Intelligence Solution must not utilise facial recognition or biometric profiling, but an IT engineer familiar with the project told Noticer News those features or others including “gait detection technology” could easily be added if the system ends up being permanently installed, as it would only require additional software.
“LiDAR is basically going to create a 3D map of current objects (obviously people) to enable a Big Brother-style monitoring of the Melbourne CBD,” they said.
The Expressions of Interest seeks a “short-term solution specifically for New Year’s Eve 2025/26” and a “scalable long-term solution that can be installed across various locations within the Local Government Area to assist Council in ongoing crowd management throughout the year”.
Respondents are also asked to provide quotes for the Council utilise the Crowd Intelligence Solution again in March at Melbourne’s Moomba Festival, which has been plagued by African gang violence over the past decade, and then at the Firelight Festival in late June or early July.
“All proposed solutions – temporary and/or permanent – must be capable of delivering real-time crowd density insights to support public safety, event coordination, and resource allocation,” the tender documents state.
The documents also request potential suppliers provide “modular pricing” for cameras and sensors, which the IT engineer said suggests the Council “wants to cost a larger implementation of these cameras with AI capabilities”.
Header image: Left, a CBD Site Plan with camera locations for NYE. Right, a crowd counting camera location for NYE (City of Melbourne).
