Buttons on traffic lights replace with smart cameras

In May, 2019 administration of Vienna announced that at the end of 2020 from some crosswalks of the city button traffic lights will disappear. Instead of them a new system which uses artificial intelligence and "smart" cameras for identification of the pedestrians wishing to cross the road will be implemented.

A new system which already began to be unrolled in the Austrian capital is developed by a command of the Austrian Gratssky technical university (TU Graz) within the project initiated by city authorities. In this system the camera connected to the computer on the traffic light which controls section of the street of 8 × 5 meters (40 sq.m.) is used. When in this zone there is a pedestrian, specially developed algorithms of deep learning analyze a trajectory of the movement, defining within one second whether this person intends to cross the road.

Vienna began to install traffic lights with cameras which replace buttons for switching of a signal

Installation gives a signal a city management system of street transport and defines when the traffic light allows pedestrians to cross the road taking into account the current flow of the movement. The signal of transition will burn exactly so much that all people, detected by the camera, could cross the street safely. On the other hand, if a system sees that the pedestrian approached the intersection, but then changed the mind and left, it will cancel a request for turning on of the traffic light.

Developers emphasize that a system does not write and does not transfer the received images, analyzing them on site in real time. Besides, a system was developed so that to work round the clock even in severe weather conditions and also to cope with fluctuations of tension, one of team members of TU Graz Horst Possegger noted.

The partner company on management of traffic of Günther Pichler will install the systems of cameras instead of normal traffic lights across all Vienna. The future of the project will depend on results of pilot testing.^[1]

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