Canadian company Vizzion, which is already the provider of the world’s largest network of traffic cameras, is launching a new platform that will give access to on-vehicle cameras, producing live imagery as they travel.
On a never before seen scale, imagery is collected in real time from a network of tens of thousands of cellular-connected on-vehicle cameras, due to Vizzion’s exclusive partnership with one of the world’s largest commercial-vehicle telematics camera suppliers. Vizzion expects to create additional partnerships, which will ultimately expand the network into the hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
By collecting imagery from key road locations or hot spots worldwide, the new system will considerably broaden the company’s coverage and add significant density to existing areas. Through partnerships with over 160 different transport agencies worldwide, Vizzion currently offers live feeds from over 56,000 roadside cameras in 35 countries.
Vizzion’s massive new network of live imagery can generate wide-ranging, high density webs of hyperlocal traffic, weather, and other on-road data that can be simply and seamlessly integrated into existing applications and services through the company’s XML Web Service. The network will provide a new platform for application developers, government road agencies, and other organizations to connect with leading camera imagery suppliers, enabling them to extract valuable road condition, road incident and atmospheric information, providing benefits in traffic management, weather reporting, incident investigation, public safety, or other fields.
Vizzion plans to use this vast resource of new data to enhance its own services, such as the Desktop Video Wall and Poor Visibility Detection Service, as well as future analytics projects. With this large pool of new data, the company anticipates both new innovations of its own and from third party application developers.
This new system continues Vizzion’s exponential expansion of its existing traffic camera network, which is growing by about 30% each year, while maintaining the high quality of its current service. The new service has been developed to ensure that it does not infringe on anyone’s privacy, as all imagery is anonymized and collected from public roads only, and no personally identifiable information, such as faces or license plates, is produced.
“Whether for use-cases such as mapping, news reporting, road management, or public safety, this new platform can save operators from expensive on-the-ground crews and other alternatives by providing live views of current conditions with unprecedented road coverage,” explained Keith Anderson, Vizzion’s marketing manager.
Vizzion’s president, Chris Cooper, elaborated, “We see tremendous added value for existing applications, but we also anticipate a whole new class of applications evolving around this new paradigm of dense and ubiquitous real-time road imagery. The launch of our first on-vehicle network of cameras is a significant milestone for the company. It has certainly been our most challenging project to date; work began on this concept over 10 years ago and we’ve had to overcome numerous technical and other obstacles along the way to deliver a quality product.”
