With the rising popularity of smart and safe cities, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have seen a spike in demand in recent years. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global ITS market for roadways is expected to grow from US$ 17.9 billion in 2020 to $36.5 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 15.3 percent.
With the rising popularity of smart and safe cities, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have seen a spike in demand in recent years. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global ITS market for roadways is expected to grow from US$ 17.9 billion in 2020 to $36.5 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 15.3 percent. ITS
has revolutionized the way authorities view transport and city management.
The research firm expects several factors to drive this growth, including increasing concerns toward public safety, growing traffic congestion problems, rising favorable government initiatives for effective traffic management, increasing adoption of eco-friendly automobile technologies, and the development of smart cities across the world.
Aiding public services
Cloud solutions are integral to the development of intelligent systems, mainly because it provides centralized control which is essential for integrating multiple applications. Adrian Cseko, Head of Sales at
Asura Technologies, pointed out that cloud-based ANPR may prove to be a viable choice for urban or even highway traffic enforcement projects.
"ANPR is arguably the best choice to obtain reference data of speeding vehicles or ones violating traffic rules," Cseko explained. "In some cases, an intact traffic surveillance camera footage can be used to detect traffic violations automatically (the wrong turn, passing the red light, crossing a closed line) and obtaining the vehicle's number plate as well as part of the process. ANPR is also a great reference tool for congestion charging and may serve statistical purposes as well as an automatized form of vehicle counting for statistical purposes."
Lower costs, better performance
Gabor Jozsa, CMO at
Adaptive Recognition, further explained that cloud-based solutions are faster and easier to set up, potentially reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
"ITS system transition to the cloud, including applications like smart city applications, toll enforcement, stopping congestion relief using hard shoulder running, etc. can be done in 3-4 times shorter and with 50-60 percent cost reduction in TCO," Jozsa said. "Other benefits include maximized scalability and optimized OpEx. Traditional, on-premise Intelligent Transportation Systems must be scaled to the peak workload, while ANPR Cloud flexibly adapts to the required workload."
Highlighting his own company's ANPR engine, Jozsa added that there is also the advantage of low false-positive rates when using a cloud solution for ITS. Also, AI-based data filtering and flexible business intelligence functions empower smart predictions and data-based decisions. Finally, wireless communication (4G, 5G: in the coming years) combined with cloud-based ANPR requires significantly less installation cost.
Benefits to large transportation companies
License plate recognition is not limited to public or government use for purposes like law enforcement. Transport companies that own their fleet would also benefit from automated license plate recognition to improve their operations.
However, not all transport companies may find a cloud-based ANPR worth the investment. Walter Verbruggen, Sales Director at
Avutec, added that with regard to ITS, a cloud-based ANPR solution is particularly for larger transport organizations and distribution centers where there are many perimeter efficiency improvements to make for ANPR in general.
Such organizations would need safe and secure parking areas for trucks along the highways, offering multiple services to truck drivers as well, all of which could be made easier and more straightforward with a cloud solution.
The data that is created as part of ITS with the help of ANPR solutions are also integral to efficient management.
Conclusion
To sum up, cloud ANPR solutions are useful to ITS as they enhance the possibilities of the technologies that are in use. But technological improvement is not the only advantage. From a customer perspective, the reduced costs and easier installation are also attractive to implement an ITS system better. Finally, the use of cloud ANPR for ITS purposes would benefit large private transport organizations would have to deal with lots of vehicles in their fleet.