Features

Machine vision techniques can provide solutions to some of the traffic planners most enduring problems With a high proportion of cars being occupied by the driver alone, one of the easiest, most environmentally friendly and cheapest methods of reducing congestion is to encourage more people to travel in each vehicle. So to persuade people to share rides, high occupancy lanes were devised to prioritise vehicles with (typically) three of more people on board and in some areas these vehicles are exempt from

Machine vision techniques hold the potential to solve a multitude of challenges facing the transportation sector Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the base technology for number plate recognition, has been in industrial use for more than three decades. It is a prime example of how, instead of having to start from scratch, the transportation sector can leverage and adapt the machine vision expertise already used in industry in order to provide robust solutions with new capabilities. “The real val

Tattile’s wide range of camera systems for machine vision use includes the Tag-7 linear camera series and the S200 smart camera range. TAG-7 is a linear CCD CameraLink compact digital camera with a linear 2 megapixel CCD sensor, and is designed to meet the main requirements of machine vision.

CARTES 2014, the global event for payment, identification and mobility, is fast approaching and the world’s experts in the sector are about to head to Paris for its biggest and most important annual gathering. The 2013 event welcomed more than 20,000 visitors, some 1,670 of whom attended the opening conference - the World Card Summit - while also visiting the 450 exhibitors at the venue.

ITS America, organisers of the 2014 ITS World Congress in Detroit, has declared the event a great success with more than 9,100 participants, 700 papers and 300 exhibiters plus the most extensive set of demonstrations ever staged. The introduction of Chief Technology Officer sessions was considered a big success attracting almost 800 attendees.

David Crawford reviews a new approach to traffic smoothing. A key objective for the Californian city of Bakersfield’s upgraded traffic operations centre (TOC), which opened in June 2014, is to help improve living conditions in a region with one of the worst air quality problems in the US. The TOC is speeding up the smoothing of traffic flows by delivering faster and better-informed traffic signal retiming and synchronisation.

Connecticut’s new administration is using smart policy and ITS solutions to bridge social divides. Andrew Bardin Williams investigates. With only 130,000 residents, New Haven can hardly be called a metropolis. Measuring less than 502km (18 square miles), the city is huddled against the coast, squeezed between two mountains (appropriately called East Rock and West Rock) that, at 111m and 213m (366ft and 700ft) respectively, can hardly be called mountains. The airport is small and has limited service, and th

Colin Sowman talks to Matthew Pencharz, the man charged with charting London’s path between catering for traveller needs, conserving ancient buildings and conforming to modern air quality standards.

Drive C2X has shown that advanced warning of poor road conditions could cut fatalities, as David Crawford explains. Connected vehicle (CV)-based warning technologies could mean 6% fewer deaths and 5% fewer injuries in road traffic accidents in Europe, according to the final results of the European Commission (EC) co-funded DRIVE C2X project. According to the European Centre for Information and Communication Technologies (EICT) which provided management support, these “prove that CV systems work and can hav

Colin Sowman catches up with the latest moves in the 5.9GHz exclusivity debate. The Wi-Fi Innovation Act, recently introduced to both the US Senate and its House of Representatives, moves into a new phase in the debate over the exclusive right of the 5.9GHz band for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications. If the Act comes into law, it would require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to conduct tests across the whole 5GHz band to determine if the spectrum can be shared without interfering with curr