Dublin City Council are responsible for traffic management. To fulfil this responsibility we need to understand how vehicles move around our City. New technology such as AI-enabled ‘smart cameras’ can help us to assess, more efficiently and accurately, the volume and classification of vehicles on our roads, as well as exploring lane discipline. This project is not concerned with enforcement and does not involve the monitoring of number plates. The objective of this project is to test the viability of the technology.
Project Activities
This is a “proof of concept” (PoC) project that will see the temporary deployment (September – December 2020) of 2 smart cameras on Bachelors Walk and St John’s Road West.
The ‘Smart’ cameras are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) software that uses object recognition to count and classify traffic, and to assess lane discipline.
Over the course of the trial we are testing the ability of the two cameras to:
- Count the number of vehicles within view.
- Classify the types of vehicles within view (bus, taxi, car, and bicycle).
- Count the number of bus / cycle lane infringements.
The anonymised results and analysis will be displayed via a visualisation dashboard accessible by Dublin City Council traffic management team.
This project employs Privacy-by-Design Principles, minimising the processing of personal data throughout the project. The video streams from the two cameras will be processed automatically by the AI to identify and report, reducing the need for storage or monitoring of footage.
For the purposes of the PoC, a minimal number of hours of footage will be stored and accessed throughout the project to validate results and tune the AI accuracy. This footage will be subsequently destroyed.
See here for Project Privacy Statement.
Impact
The purpose of the trial is to test the viability of the technology to provide accurate, real-time data to Dublin City Council traffic teams to aid in their decision-making. Having a better understanding of vehicular flows around the city can lead to:
- Improved safety of pedestrians, cyclists and vehicle occupants.
- Air pollution and environmental monitoring benefits assessment capabilities.
- Traffic congestion and improved public transport performance.
- Improved understanding for optimised local authority planning with data-backed decision making.
This project is a partnership between Dublin City Council, Arm, SmartDTV and Vodafone.