Ever saw a camera along the side highway and were worried that you would get a ticket for speeding? You probably don’t have to worry, these cameras have been installed with a different purpose in mind. Most of these devices have been installed to monitor traffic conditions and provide visuals in the case of a collision. However, as significant technological advances have been made in this sector (mainly caused by artificial intelligence), these devices might get another purpose. They could actually help us optimize our traffic flow or identify dangerous zones were accidents often occur.
Researchers from the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the University of Texas Center for Transportation Research are currently developing software which can perform traffic analyses and find patterns through deep learning and data mining. This software could easily analyse the thousands of hours worth of footage the government collects each day.
Whilst this new tool is still in its infant stage, it already has to ability to use raw traffic footage to recognize objects – people, cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, motorcycles and traffic lights – and characterize how those objects move and interact. The collected information can then be analyzed and queried by officials to facilicate evidence-based decision making.
As this, and similar tools will quickly be further developed, they have the ability to optimize our daily commute to the office, reducing traffic jams and minimizing the potential of collisions. I, for one, can’t wait of these technologies to be incooperated into our daily lives so I will no longer spend a major part of my life cursing in traffic jams. Are you as excited about the potential of artificial intelligence as I am? Let me know in the comments!
Source:
https://sciencenode.org/feature/urban-traffic-and-ai.php
Indeed this technology is very promising with tangible results already obtained like you mentioned in your blog. The value it would bring to our lives is priceless, also considering that many of us has to go through traffic jams eveyday in Netherlands. What I understood from your text and my research on the internet is, the technology now helps mainly to the police offices and healthcare providers to detect any problem within the traffic flow. However, its value can be extended to our lives by integrating this AI with that of Google maps or other navigation services in order to get a better and clearer vision of the traffic in real time based on simultaneous reports from the camreas instead of less precise satellite information. This technology would then help a lot in our decision making process by notifying a sudden crash or overload on a street and recommending to take an alternative way to home/work etc. Even though it is still in its development stage, a later challange for this technology may be integrating them with self driven cars which allow them to directly communicate with the AI of those cars and direct a vehicle throughout the way with the help of continuous data sharing in real time. This is the first future challange that comes to my mind maybe you can share more about this in your next blog?