Many of us experience a fiendish need to break traffic rules. We are hard-pressed for time (who isn’t). A lack of patience to wait. No traffic cops around. Yet, nowadays, most of us think twice about breaking signals. Reason? The presence of a third eye, CCTV cameras that monitor us.
The question is, are these CCTV cameras fool-proof? According to a report, the cameras aren’t equipped to detect traffic and civic violations in Ahmedabad. The report mentions that it will take a year to train the city’s smart surveillance cameras to spot speeding violations.
The report claimed that in a pre-bid meeting, software vendors communicated to the Smart City team of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) that a large amount of footage was necessary to train the AI to detect these violations.
Vendors have suggested the use of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to be included in the tenders so the cameras can analyse footage for violations.
Earlier, the AMC demanded that the cameras be able to spot 34 traffic and civic
violations, including spitting on streets. An AMC official was quoted as saying, “There were privacy issues raised by the vendors, over citizens being recorded for long hours and they argued that this capability should be kept out of the purview of surveillance.”
The vendors pointed out that the software wasn’t equipped to monitor passengers standing on vehicle footboards given that public vehicles could be too crowded for algorithms to distinguish individuals.
Detection of uncovered construction debris in trucks was another issue. The vendors, the report highlighted, claimed that the cameras couldn’t be put to use since the datasets to train AI were inadequate.
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