The world has a love affair with automobiles. Indeed, in much of the highway systems around the world, problems with congestion, monitoring, efficiency, and safety have arisen due to the number of vehicles passing through every single day. With yesterday’s basic highway monitoring systems overwhelmed, intelligent video
The world has a love affair with automobiles. Indeed, in much of the highway systems around the world, problems with congestion, monitoring, efficiency, and safety have arisen due to the number of vehicles passing through every single day. With yesterday's basic highway monitoring systems overwhelmed, intelligent video solutions (IVS) can be the answer. As Eric Olson, VP of Marketing at Pure Tech Systems explained, “Video is a powerful tool for detection, confirmation, and forensic analysis. The industry is recognizing these attributes and leverages it widely across the transportation infrastructure.”
Video analytics already plays an important role in today's highway systems, Olson said. “Protecting bridges and overpasses, detecting congestion, providing flow statistics, and aiding in law enforcement efforts, as video analytics continues continue to evolve, increasing in accuracy and providing a larger volume of actionable data, it will become more valuable and affordable to the transportation community.” Indeed, IVS is a powerful tool, expected to play a big role across all aspects of transportation management, including, “planning, security monitoring, health monitoring, driver safety, enforcement, and real-time route management,” he said.
As Olson further elaborated, intelligent video is used on a regular basis in the transportation industry for security monitoring of bridges and overpasses, vehicle counting, license plate recognition (LPR), and for providing congestion statuses to traveler. However, there are many other ways that VCA can be used to make our highways safer and more efficient. Accident identification, “Related to the idea of monitoring congestion, is the use of video analytics to identify potential situations or accidents. Another is non-vehicle monitoring, where as the number of vehicles continue to increase, the incentive to walk or bike becomes more important. Video analytics is increasing being used to classify and monitor pedestrian and bicycle traffic to judge the success of programs encouraged to increase their usage.”