In today’s world, everything is moving towards automation and every move is made to save time and increase the standard of living. The main place where we spend most of our time is in commuting, we spend almost 9 hours per week in commuting be it from work, school or for some menial task like shopping or picking up groceries. Here is where the video analytics in traffic control can completely change the ballgame of how we navigate through traffic. Video Analytics in Traffic Control can be used either on the central server where all the data from the traffic camera is collected or it can be directly inbuilt in the traffic camera to speed up the process. The various problems which can be solved by Video Analytics are:
- Traffic Congestions
- Accidents or Collisions
- Quick and Efficient Toll Booth Operations
- Major Issue of Finding Parking in Public Space
There are mainly two reasons why video analytics can easily resolve the above issues which are: Firstly it can process the movement on daily basis on any given road and formulate movement-based analytics which helps to detect any traffic rule violations such as over speeding, lane departure, or signal jumping. Secondly and the most important is pattern recognition which helps to recognize objects in the video frame such as pedestrians or vehicles. Then after these two steps, enough data is collected to be processed which is first processed by video processing to generate alerts and then passed on to the data analytics server for further processing.
The main Functionality of Video analytics in Traffic Control are:-
- Detection of Vehicles or Pedestrian can prove to be very important in pedestrian safety and it can also give an approximate value of pedestrians and vehicles travelling on the road which can help other smart cities with similar technology.
- Detection of which type of vehicle is travelling on road such as bus, truck or car
- These videos can also prove to be the major evidence in road accidents and make it easier to identify which vehicle caused the accident, especially in hit and run cases.
- Recognition of License Plates to identify the person the vehicle is registered to and also to keep an eye on the vehicle if found doing any suspicious activities.
- Detection of Stopped vehicle or if any vehicle is coming in the wrong way then it can easily alert the traffic controllers which can then alert the people traveling on the road which can prevent major accidents and save many lives.
- It can also detect congestion or whether the traffic is moving slow or fast and then detect the cause behind it by analysing all the videos on the given road.
- It can also detect abandoned objects on the road which may be a security threat and alert the traffic controllers who can then stop the flow of traffic until the threat is eliminated.
Video Analytics is now not a luxury but a genuine need of the hour which can improve the traffic in various ways and also save us a lot of time and frustration we face in traffic.
