How AI helps National Highways with Intelligent Traffic Monitoring?

Highways are changing with hi-tech Cameras and ICT systems. While Cameras can be “eyes”, regulators are demanding “Intelligent traffic monitoring” for regulating traffic and automated decision making to accommodate the high growth of traffic flows, compliances, and better governance.

Challenges faced while monitoring highways

Traffic flows have grown exponentially over the past decade. Over 10 million new vehicles will be added to our roads every year for the next 5 years, which means traffic volumes on our highways are expected to double in five years’ time, with an increase in the number of vehicles there is also an increased frequency of accidents happening at intersections. Traffic Management is a high priority for any government. Multiple agencies are working with technology to provide better service to citizens. But the real situation on the ground can be understood by examining the existing state of affairs:

•  Multiple agencies working in Silos:

  In India, municipal corporations are responsible for road maintenance, Urban development authorities for road development, Traffic Police for traffic regulation/enforcement and City Police for regulating crime on roads. Resulting in a Lack of coordination, sharing of information, or centralized monitoring

•  Lack of Manpower:

  Most government bodies and infrastructure asset managers do not have enough people to manually monitor the conditions of each corner of a highway and its numerous extensions.

•  Insufficient Alert Mechanisms:

  The existing systems are not equipped to accurately detect & locate accidents and alert emergency systems, ambulances, and other key responders in real-time.

Due to these reasons, highway infrastructure across the world needs an upgrade for better safety and security purposes.

What is Intelligent Traffic Monitoring?

Intelligent traffic monitoring is the process of aggregating and summarizing traffic data. This data captures vehicles & their movements across public transport systems. It can capture a variety of data points in a fraction of a second. This information often includes the number of vehicles, their speed, physical attributes, and unique identifiers. Based on this rich collection of data, intelligent systems can derive real-time insights and nudge actions by sending out alerts. Intelligent road traffic monitoring systems can open the doors to a wide range of benefits like:

•  Robust Law Enforcement:

  Stolen, overloaded, or licensed vehicles breaching the speed limits or lane restrictions can be easily detected.

•  Automatic Infrastructure Monetization:

  Most freeways, highways, and other significant projects depend on toll gates for revenue collection. While the quality of such infrastructure has improved, the process of collecting tolls is still the same – a vehicle stops, the driver pays the tariff, and other cars stand in a queue. With an intelligent traffic monitoring system, that can integrate with the FASTag system the vehicles can seamlessly drive-through. The system will identify the vehicle type and number plate as it approaches the toll gate.

•  Real-Time Traffic Management:

  Authorities working with an intelligent traffic monitoring system will be able to detect uncommon queues, get alerts to accidents, and locate slow vehicles. After detecting, the system will send out alerts across the systems to ensure other drivers can take timely & appropriate action.

•  Optimal Infrastructure Utilization:

  When scaled across a vast network of roads, highways, and freeways, an intelligent road traffic monitoring system will be able to detect the underutilized and overused areas. A system can be designed for optimal infrastructure utilization to mitigate traffic in congested hours using these inputs. This can be a cost-effective solution with the same value proposition as building new infrastructure.

AI & Computer Vision to Enable Intelligent Traffic Monitoring

The advent of AI (artificial intelligence) is changing the way highways are managed, leveraging Computer vision to detect objects in a digital image or video frame without human intervention. For example, while anyone can look at a camera feed and observe an accident, a computer vision-led system can capture unique identifiers like color, number plate, and other characteristics across a timeline. Manual monitoring, on the other hand, has its limitations. Even the most skilled experts cannot capture all the details 24 x 7. Every detail missed around a critical incident on the highway is a lost opportunity for mitigating accidents, crime, and damage to national assets. Just the cost of repairing and law enforcement for such incidents makes CCTV and computer vision-driven systems a highly efficient, effective, and needed alternative. Such an intelligent system would succeed when deployed with a well-engineered platform, insights from the live data streams will get aggregated on a unified platform covering potentially thousands of locations. At this scale, the system can be very effective in delivering

• 24 x 7 Monitoring Capabilities Including Patrolling at Night
• Road Monitoring with Scheduled Maintenance
• Insights, Reports, and Real-Time Notifications for the Concerned Authorities
• More effectively and efficiently monitor growing traffic

Hence, the control room will be better positioned to ensure the security and safety of commuters and maintain road traffic rules compliance.

AIVID Techvision for Smart Traffic Monitoring

Automatic Incident detection and Traffic-flow measurement using video cameras is required to accommodate the high growth of traffic flows, compliance, and better governance. AIVID offers a simple ready-to-deploy platform with an intuitive visual interface to select from predefined activity powered by AIVID AI BOTs to automate inspection across highways at a click of a button  & generates real-time insights.  The edge-based software works with any IP camera for monitoring (24X7). The Central monitoring platform shall display an aggregate picture by connecting multiple locations with hundreds of cameras. It can easily integrate via API integration supporting third-party VMS, Traffic Monitoring system, Command Center software. AIVID Bots, deep learning ML models can monitor highways, detecting incidents in real-time like road accidents, traffic jams, fallen objects, and alerting the authorities to take action. The AIVID Bots can be deployed across a wide range of use-cases:

• Detecting vehicle over-speeding the speed limit
• Detecting vehicles in wrong lane or driving in wrong direction.
• Tracking axles for real-time calculation of vehicle length.
• Counting vehicles and providing descriptive data.
• Detecting and tracking overloaded vehicles.
• Estimating vehicle’s position across a timeline.

Manual surveillance served us well for a long time. But the scale of traffic, complexity of highway networks, and lack of sufficient manpower to administer highways have created the need for a smarter solution. To know more, write to us at info@aividtechvision.com