Traficon to provide incident detection in Dartford Tunnel

Traficon has been recently contracted to provide 70 VIP-IP Video Image Processing boards for installation in the Dartford Tunnel on the M25 London Orbital Motorway. The technology will be installed in collaboration with Vital Technology Ltd, and will provide extensive Automatic Incident Detection (AID) capabilities, including the detection of stopped vehicles and smoke detection. The Highways Agency (HA) is installing a CCTV-based Automatic Incident Detection (AID) system on the Dartford - Thurrock River Crossing as part of the European Union Directive 2004/54/EC concerning minimum safety requirements for tunnels in the Trans-European Road Network. The Crossing forms a vital link in one of Europe’s busiest motorways, with an average of 140,000 vehicles a week passing through the two dual-lane tunnels and over the four-lane cable-stayed bridge. The project is due for completion in September 2013.

The Traficon VIP-IP is a multi-functional Video Image Processor for traffic control using network cameras. It integrates automatic incident detection, data collection, vehicle presence detection, digital recording of pre and post-incident video sequences and streaming video in one board for a variety of traffic management applications, such as tunnels, highways and bridges. The VIP-IP board makes use of field-proven Traficon algorithms that were implemented in other boards, such as the company’s VIP-T video detection board for analog cameras, which ensures high reliability and a low false alarm rate for the new IP version. Data, events and alarms generated by the VIP-IP detector boards are handled by the Traficon Management System, known as ‘Flux’, which is designed to manage and control all traffic information generated by the various detectors and to make it useful, meaningful and relevant to the user.

Sukhdev Bhogal, business development director at Traficon, said, “This award demonstrates our strong market position in video based Automatic Incident Detection systems and our client’s confidence in our solutions. By detecting incidents fast, secondary accidents can be avoided and traffic congestion reduced dramatically.” Paul Ward, director at Vital Technology, commented, “In Traficon, we have chosen a technology that is both reliable and industry-proven. Moreover, the Traficon people have proven to be very responsive to our needs and are always willing to go that extra mile to provide best support.”

27 June 2012