ISJ Exclusive: Building a bridge between road traffic data and data vision

The intensity of urban traffic has been growing from year to year. This not only affects the safety of residents, but also the traffic control, security on the roads and the ecological situation in cities.

Needless to say, companies are generating a lot of accurate metadata as a result. In one month, for instance, they can accumulate terabytes of video content and millions of events from multiple camera feeds.

In such cases, modern video surveillance technology and traffic data management come to the rescue. Analytical platforms are highly demanded in the market and will play an increasingly important role in traffic and traffic-flow management in the future.

FF Data Factory is one such smart platform that works with all kinds of road traffic data.

Why do you need a tool for data management?

The main problem for municipalities and police today is not so much getting transport data at a moment’s notice, but not having the ability to look at this data in a specific period of time, from a long-term perspective. Unfortunately, today, there is no centralised data platform (software) which allows you to get a fairly global view within the city, region or entire nation.

The FF Group team was one of the first to develop the intelligent road traffic data platform for smart mobility, which allows it to search traffic data incredibly fast and very intuitively. In this way, our team is able to add new data facilities to the market.

How does FF Data Factory work?

FF Data Factory is a huge, incredibly fast database and platform where you can collect, synchronise and analyse data from the heaviest road traffic flow.

Data Factory receives vehicle data (license plate, make, model, color and type, movement direction and zone at the time of the violation event) received from the IP cameras equipped with any FF Group EDGE app (such as our CAMMRA software installed on Axis cameras) or our universal, server-based sensor NumberOk (which can get video from any standard IP camera).

The platform provides fast and intuitive smart vehicle search with confirmation video from Milestone XProtect. This search can be based on any of vehicle parameters and can generate traffic insights for whole agglomerations and small projects equally.

At the same time, our customers can configure Individual business logic (software) in one day without involving a programmer. There is no need to write code; with Data Factory we just reconfigure the software based on customer’s demand.

To whom can our smart platform FF Data Factory be useful?

First off, it can help pretty much any small city as well as larger ones, by becoming part of a traffic monitoring system.

The most important issue for the complete functioning of modern computer systems and networks is a centralised collection of traffic data for each city, region or police station. Many users rely on traffic data (often video data) to be able to process the databases of their video management system.

Some systems are better adapted to this, others are worse, but in principle none of them processes traffic data of ten or even 100 events per second. But, a city or region whose system registers ten to 100s of vehicles every second will generate more than 100,000 such events every day. This adds up to several million events per month and tens-of-hundreds of millions of events per year.

There have been attempts to create software inside video management systems that work with traffic data, but this requires a huge amount of computing resources. The client needs a result in a few seconds and a simple screenshot to confirm the data. Then, the customer needs a video confirmation and details of the event.

In such a situation, a smart platform such as FF Data Factory comes to the rescue, which at present works directly in Milestone XProtect. So, building traffic monitoring systems doesn’t have to be an expensive undertaking with a significant investment in a massive IT infrastructure with a powerful data center.

How does FF Data Factory work inside Milestone XProtect?

At first glance, it may seem that this is another data plugin connected to a VMS. However, none of the previous platforms has been designed to manage and quickly evaluate huge amounts of traffic data, which can be relatively complex.

For example, each event has many parameters such as time stamp, information about the vehicle direction, license plate, country of origin/registration of the vehicle, the vehicle’s make, model, color, zone/lane, etc.

Now imagine that several thousand of these data segments are sent from each camera to the central database. Now, imagine trying to search the database for the necessary information on various combinations of these parameters, keeping in mind the fact that other analysts generate a lot of data in the VMS such as motion detection, recognition of various objects, face detection, unauthorised gathering, shots, screams, glass breaking, etc.

For this reason, the architecture of FF Data Factory was designed in such a way as to seamlessly process data from several sites simultaneously with dozens of high-speed traffic cameras not only receiving and storing a large amount of traffic data, but also quickly interpreting and analysing it.

This is to say that the operator who works with Milestone receives a constant overview of the traffic situation in a given city using a dashboard with key information. For example, it can be pre-configured to analyse vehicle groups and generate alarms that alert you to the presence of a wanted or suspicious vehicle.

The unprecedented variability and flexibility of FF Data Factory when working with traffic data makes it a real revolution in the smart mobility sector. Moreover, it allows you to generate a new dashboard in a few days with its own logic for each client for their individual tasks (insights).

For example, in one city, FF Data Factory can track the number of trucks passing through historical parts of the city, in another it can calculate the average time required to travel around the city, while in the third it can track the movement of garbage trucks and buses.

Another client can use FF Data Factory as a central search platform, for example, to search for defaulters by car number and blacklist them, or, without knowing the license plate of the car, find it by make, brand, color or country of registration.

What will you get with Data Factory soon?

As you can see, this fast and flexible platform knows no boundaries. On the one hand, it is able to quickly and easily connect to the VMS and conduct a quick search for traffic data there, and on the other hand, it can conduct deep traffic analysis based on any or all the parameters of the detected vehicles.

In 2023, FF Group will add a new search parameter in the Data Factory depending on the engine type of the car (combustion, electric or hybrid). It will also be possible to obtain information on the classification of emergency vehicles (ambulance, fire trucks, police cruisers, etc.).

In the longer term and in cooperation with partner manufacturers, FF Data Factory will also be able to generate important social data, for example, noting aggressive driver behavior, registering noisy cars, identifying polluting drivers, etc.

Article provided by FF Group

To find out more information, visit: https://ff-group.org/ff_data_factory/