ITS firm Kapsch TrafficCom has been awarded a contract to provide video analytics and connected vehicle technology in Montreal, Canada, to enhance safety for vulnerable road users.
Across the Notre Dame corridor and in the city centre in Montreal, Kapsch TrafficCom will address safety and mobility via it’s Orchestrated Connected Corridor (OCC) services suite. OCC uses traffic data from existing video cameras and connected vehicles to provide drivers with real-time notifications about vulnerable road users (VRUs) and traffic authorities with traffic statistics tools.
“We are deploying our Orchestrated Connected Corridor with Video Analytics across 19 intersections in Downtown Montreal,” explained JB Kendrick, president, North America, Kapsch TrafficCom. “Embracing the power of deep learning, we are not only enhancing safety but we also provide city officials with real-time data that can make immediate impacts.”
OCC is based on a services suite that enables digital transformation for highway and urban environments, Kapsch noted. They provide a basis for cohesive, consolidated and modular services for increased safety, mobility and sustainability, with the option to expand capabilities in the future as authorities’ needs continue to evolve. OCC’s architecture enables repeatable and scalable services such as video analytics, predictive analytics, decision support and demand management.
The central element of the system delivered by Kapsch TrafficCom is the Deep Learning Versatile Platform (DLVP) video analytics platform. It analyzes video feeds from existing cameras and processes it with AI in real time, improving response times to safety-critical events.
DLVP is hardware agnostic, meaning that it can process data from various inputs and video formats, resolutions and frame rates. This allows for the solution to rely on existing hardware instead of requiring expensive additional traffic cameras, keeping costs down and enabling a more sustainable approach to traffic management.
While the platform itself can be customized to meet various needs of traffic management, situational awareness and road safety, the system in Montreal is aimed at detecting incidents, classifying vehicles and VRUs (pedestrians and cyclists), wrong-way driving, congestion and other situations that are potentially dangerous.
In the event of an incident, a services dashboard will provide warnings and relevant information to their operators at the city’s traffic management centre. The data from the DLVP will be fed into the Kapsch’s connected corridor management service, the Connected Mobility Control Center (CMCC), to broadcast specific alerts (congestion, stopped vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles on road) directly with drivers in the vicinity of the incident using connected vehicle technology.