Japanese tech giant NEC and French firm Outsight are collaborating to advance airport intelligence with lidar-based spatial AI delivering real-time operational insights across terminals and surrounding infrastructure.

Outsight’s spatial AI technology has been integrated directly into NEC’s airport management systems, providing real-time 3D understanding of airport environments. By using 3D lidar and edge computing, it provides anonymous, camera-free insights to monitor passenger and vehicle movement, optimise operational resources, and strengthen safety and efficiency.

Building on deployments across multiple continents, this partnership demonstrates how lidar-based spatial intelligence is becoming a cornerstone of smart airports, enabling operators to manage complex environments with accuracy and agility.

The combined platform supports operation and passenger experience improvements, including: better passenger flow management with precise crowd density monitoring; greater operational efficiency through real-time spatial analytics; stronger security capabilities via automated behavioural analysis; and data-informed decisions using 3D environmental insights.

These capabilities are already being realised at an international airport in North America, where the integrated system delivers anonymised spatial analysis at checkpoints. The technology estimates queue density, passenger flow and wait times, with data shared on lobby displays to support real-time communication and travel awareness.

“Our first implementation and collaboration with Outsight shows how our integrated approach delivers not only practical value for airport operations, but real-time awareness to travellers,” said Bill Carleton, director of NEC in America (www.necam.com).

NEC and Outsight showcased the integration at this month’s World Aviation Festival in Lisbon, with live demonstrations of airport deployment data. Attendees experienced first-hand how the combined platform delivers spatial intelligence for modern airport operations.

“Our partnership with NEC brings together complementary technologies that solve real airport challenges and that are rapidly being deployed at scale globally,” said Raul Bravo, president of Outsight (www.outsight.ai). “The Lisbon demo showed aviation professionals how lidar spatial AI integrates seamlessly with existing airport infrastructure.”

Outsight’s platform, based on lidar technology, captures and analyses precise 3D environmental data using spatial AI. NEC’s platform processes and contextualises this information for airport operations teams. Together, the technologies provide a real-time motional digital twin of airport spaces, automated detection and anonymised tracking of people and objects, behavioural pattern analysis to enhance security and efficiency, integration with existing airport systems, and scalable use across a range of airport environments.

Operators of transportation hubs – such as airports, train stations, sports venues, roadways and industrial sites – gain access to real-time spatial intelligence.

NEC (www.nec.com) has a presence in more than 50 countries and $23bn in revenue.