The City of Bellevue, the UW and Microsoft just launched a fascinating machine-learning effort to analyze traffic danger and identify collision locations and conditions before they happen.
But they need your help marking-up segments of video to identify people walking, biking and driving so the Video Analytics Towards Vision Zero program can better determine the conditions where close calls occur.
And that’s the potential brilliance of this project. Rather than simply chasing collision locations after someone has already been injured or killed, this analysis can look at roadway conditions that lead to lots of near misses and use that data to predict the spots where the next injury or death is most likely to occur.
The system uses footage from existing traffic cameras to track “objects,” the word the system uses to refer to people biking, walking or driving. It also tracks each mode’s common paths and gets an accurate count of trips by each. This data alone is potentially valuable, especially if the automated system makes it more affordable to gather more accurate biking and walking counts than the limited data that exists today: (more…)
