Smart Mobility
Outdoor Parking Availability & Reserved parking Management
Finding a parking space in crowded city centers can be a time consuming and frustrating experience for drivers. In addition, reports have estimated that over 30 percent of traffic in a city is caused by drivers searching for a parking spot, leading to congestion and increased carbon emissions. Having real time information on available parking spaces in different locations in the city or a specific parking lot can be very useful for drivers saving time and resulting emissions. But calculating this information for outdoor parking areas is a challenge as typically there are no control barriers to track the entry/exit of vehicles. Further, the challenging environmental conditions like visibility, rain, snow etc. make conventional solutions not very accurate.
Our advanced parking management solution using our IPP Kernel platform addresses these challenges with advanced analytics, faster customisation and easier implementation, thereby reducing our implementation costs. We can use different image sources like CCTV, thermal or stereo to detect and differentiate vehicles entering/exiting a parking lot and calculate the exact number of available parking slots.
With our image analyser being able to process four different image sources, we can offer solutions to a wide range of scenarios irrespective of the limitations of visibility and other factors that limit the performance of other conventional solutions in the market. Our IPP Kernel platform uses the analysed images from installed cameras to calculate and publish real time parking availability information. Further, our license plate detection solution can be coupled with this system for automatic management of reserved car parking areas. This platform lets users to reserve parking lots and navigate to the exact location.
Reserved Lane Management using Vehicle differentiation and Licence plate recognition
Road infrastructure in urban areas is shared by multiple users with different modes of transport. Reserved lane management ensuring different modes of transport use specified lanes is one of the prerequisites for smooth and safe movement of traffic. Many cities around the world have cameras installed overlooking traffic lanes to identify vehicles violating lane restrictions. But it is still difficult to identify violators in real time due to the fast moving nature of traffic and challenging outdoor environmental conditions. Further, the vast amount of information to be processed on a day to day basis to identify traffic violations is an added challenge that needs to be overcome by cities.
Our advanced vehicle differentiation solution using our IPP Kernel platform addresses these challenges with advanced analytics, faster customisation and easier implementation. Our solution is able to recognise and identify different type of vehicles along with their license plate information even at very high speeds. Our algorithms customized for a specific scenario can alert traffic managers in real time with license plate information of violators.
The license plate detection solution can also be applied to many other applications like automatic management of reserved vehicle parking slots.
Smart People Monitoring
Queue Waiting Time (QWT) estimation
Queues are a part of our everyday lives. From queueing to clear security checks at airports to ordering food at restaurants, we queue to access services in our daily lives. But the amount of time that people spend in queues can cause stress, loss of productive hours and impact customer experience. Advanced information of real time queuing time can help users or customers plan their time better. It is also very useful information for facility managers to understand the waiting time trends and use them as a KPI to manage daily operations.
Our Queue waiting time estimation solution using our IPP Kernel platform and using images from existing or installed CCTV or thermal sensors can calculate the real time queuing time. Our advanced analytics ensures that the results are accurate by accounting for variables in a specific queue.
This solution can be applied in any queueing scenarios like:
1. Boarding queues for chair/ski lifts in ski resorts
2. Boarding queues for urban Cable Car systems
3. Security / Check-In queues at Airports / Railway stations
4. Queues for different rides at Amusement Parks
5. QWT for entry into Museums and other public attractions
People counting & Occupancy monitoring of public spaces
In Cities, accurate information about people flow, occupancy and usage of public services is critical to plan and ensure efficient operations of services like transportation, security, entertainment etc. Cities currently use manual sample counting to generate this information which may not be very reliable. Investment in sensors and analytics technologies to automatically generate this information can be challenging considering cities’ large areas, population densities along with high investment cost.
Ctrl4 Enviro has developed an innovative solution to address these challenges. CCTV cameras have become a ubiquitous feature of cities with almost all cities having some or most of their areas covered under surveillance. Currently, their video streams are only used to address security issues.
We have developed our image analytics solution to use these images to calculate real time people flow and occupancy in public places. This information is very valuable and can be applied for various applications like planning traffic and transportation, providing adequate services like toilets, restaurants etc. in public places and many more. This real time information can be critical for efficient crowd control during events like religious congregations, concerts, etc. to detect and prevent safety incidents from overcrowding. Apart from calculating this information, our solution has the capability to automatically control systems; for example, traffic signals can be operated dynamically using real time pedestrian flow information to ensure adequate crossing time.
Modelling the usage of public transport infrastructure
Efficient planning of public transport infrastructure like bus routes, metro lines etc. require accurate information about the movement of people across different areas in the city. This information is difficult to measure especially for bus systems with their highly distributed route network and absence of entry or exit access to capture user flow.
Our people flow monitoring solution using the images from existing CCTV cameras installed in most buses can calculate the exact information about the number of people using a particular length of bus route during a particular time. The big data analytics capabilities of our IPP Kernel platform can process the information for the entire bus network of a city and provide usage statistics per route, between two stations at different time of day. This data can be used to identify in real time the busiest routes in the city and help transport managers take necessary mitigation measures like adding additional buses to a network, changing the frequency of buses etc.
The availability of reliable data can also be very useful to plan for future scenarios like music festivals, football matches etc.
Smart Surveillance
Smart Surveillance
• Detecting Bag drop
• Detecting Vandalism
• Detecting Suspicious behaviour
With public security incidents becoming a major source of concern, surveillance cameras have become a common feature in of cities and organizations around the world. With conventional surveillance cameras, there is a continuous recording of images but this is only helpful to analyse an incident after it has already occurred but not to detect it while it is occurring and take immediate action. For security cameras to be effective, their video stream needs to be watched by a person 24×7 which is almost impossible considering the large of cameras installed at a facility or a city and huge cost of manpower involved.
Conventional solutions in the market for automatic detection of security incidents require large investments for equipment and daily operations. One of the biggest advantages is that we can work with existing installed cameras wherever possible, thereby reducing the initial investment cost for the customer. Further, they are restricted in their ability to handle information due to sudden large inflow of people and vehicles during peak hours thereby reducing their effectiveness.
Our state of the art solution addresses this challenge with advanced analytics, faster customisation and easier implementation. Apart from surveillance cameras, our analytics solutions can work with stereo, infra-red and thermal images, thereby making the system very reliable. This ensures that we can offer solutions to a wide range of scenarios irrespective of the limitations of light and other limiting factors. Our IPP Kernel platform can send alarms to concerned personnel if any predefined incidents are detected to take action along with controlling systems like entry/exit controls, alarm systems etc. as required.
Eco Cable Solutions
Eco Cable – Queue Waiting Time estimation and Energy reduction solution for Cable Transit systems
Our Eco Cable solution with Queue Waiting Time (QWT) estimation and Energy Reduction (Patent pending) capabilities is an integrated solution based on image analytics from thermal cameras. It has the following unique features.
• It is the only QWT estimation system licensed to integrate with ropeway engine operating systems to control their speeds as per safety requirements to achieve energy reduction.
• It obtains information in a privacy-respectful way due to the use of thermal images.
• It can provide real-time information of QWT easily accessible to the users and managers in a web or mobile platform.
Cable Transit (CT) systems are an important mode of transportation in areas with hilly terrains. From being used principally at ski resorts and tourist destinations in mountainous regions, CT systems have become accepted as an efficient, sustainable and cost effective solution for urban mass transit. But one of the recurrent concerns of users of CT systems is the waiting time at boarding stations. Hence the real-time QWT information would be highly valuable both for users and managers of these systems. Further, these systems are typically operated at a constant speed throughout their operation irrespective of the number of users resulting in significant wastage of energy. Their energy consumption depends on their operating speed and height difference between the boarding and exit stations.
Our solution can be applied for any cable transit system like:
- Chair Lifts and Gondola Systems in Ski Resorts
- Tourist Cable Cars
- Urban Cable Transit
Blue Snow – Our tailor made solution for ski resorts
Blue Snow is our integrated tailor made solution for Queue Waiting Time (QWT) and Energy Reduction for ski resorts based on our IPP Kernel platform. This solution has an estimated potential to reduce the annual energy consumption of a ski lift by 28%*.
A specific lift at a ski resort could have many skiers queuing while a nearby one could be almost empty but all the lifts are operated at the same speed. Currently, there is an option to modulate the speed manually by operators but they do not consider this as a priority as they are mainly tasked with taking care of users’ safety during boarding. This results in an inefficient and high energy intensive system with a lot of potential to reduce energy consumption through speed modulation.
Further if the real time QWT is available for all the lifts in a ski resort, skiers could choose to use a less crowded lift. This can promote a uniform distribution of skiers resulting in lower QWT and improved user experience. Ski resort managers could also use this QWT information as a KPI for their operations and take investment decisions according to actual occupancy trends.
The Blue Snow pack for one ski lift includes:
• Analysis of the specific ski lift queue.
• Supply and installation of one thermal camera and an Image Analyser integrated with Blue Snow software
• Communication system to provide the processed information to the skiers.
• Information interface between the system and the skier. It is possible for instance to use the current mobile app or web page of the resort to publish the information.
• High luminosity text screens showing waiting time in different locations in the resort so that the skier can choose the different ski slopes.
• Ctrl4 Enviro mobile app (if required by the customer).
*Estimated from a pilot installed in a ski lift at a ski resort
Energy Efficiency and Water Treatment
Public use buildings, particularly sport facilities with swimming pools, consume huge amounts of energy, water and chemical additives. Moreover, the last evaporate from the water surface causing an unpleasant and even a harmful environment.
Our expert sensing and metering lead to an optimized control with a high efficient use of every kWh, liter of water and of chlorine for its treatment.
Our pack is:
- Analysis of the problem / environment
- A proposal for deploying a new monitoring and automation system or for the restyling of the existing one, including:
- The most suitable sensors
- The control hardware and software
- The interface platform to easily access to the results database
- The assessments of the achieved savings after one year with our system and, in the case of indoor swimming pools, of the improvement of the water and air quality.