Evaluating Computer Vision Techniques for Urban Mobility on Large-Scale, Unconstrained Roads
This addresses urban mobility and safety for city planners and authorities by scaling inspections beyond manual methods, though it is incremental in applying existing computer vision techniques to a new domain.
The paper tackled road safety by proposing a mobile imaging setup using computer vision to detect road irregularities, infrastructure issues, and traffic violations on 2000 km of urban roads, quantitatively measuring safety with constructed metrics.
Conventional approaches for addressing road safety rely on manual interventions or immobile CCTV infrastructure. Such methods are expensive in enforcing compliance to traffic rules and do not scale to large road networks. This paper proposes a simple mobile imaging setup to address several common problems in road safety at scale. We use recent computer vision techniques to identify possible irregularities on roads, the absence of street lights, and defective traffic signs using videos from a moving camera-mounted vehicle. Beyond the inspection of static road infrastructure, we also demonstrate the mobile imaging solution's applicability to spot traffic violations. Before deploying our system in the real-world, we investigate the strengths and shortcomings of computer vision techniques on thirteen condition-based hierarchical labels. These conditions include different timings, road type, traffic density, and state of road damage. Our demonstrations are then carried out on 2000 km of unconstrained road scenes, captured across an entire city. Through this, we quantitatively measure the overall safety of roads in the city through carefully constructed metrics. We also show an interactive dashboard for visually inspecting and initiating action in a time, labor and cost-efficient manner. Code, models, and datasets used in this work will be publicly released.