Nexar, Blyncsy crowd-source dash cams for road maintenance

  • July 20, 2021
  • William Payne

Dash cam crowd-sourcing vision developer Nexar and mobility data intelligence specialist Blyncsy are partnering to collect data on America’s 4.1 million miles of public highway. The two companies plan to provide intelligence on public road conditions to state and local government authorities that maintain highways.

Nexar’s billions of crowdsourced images will be used by Blyncsy’s Payver technology and machine learning models to provide the necessary data and insights.

According to studies by the US Department of Transport, over 50 percent of fatalities on America’s roadways – roughly 19,000 deaths annually – result when motorists leave their travel lanes. Most pavement markings are repainted only once a year, but with harsh weather conditions and degrading asphalt pavement markings often need to be repainted or maintained more often. The challenge for state and local government transport authorities is knowing how their roads are performing on a daily basis with the ability to be proactive in fixing an issue before it’s a problem.

Payver provides up-to-date information on highways and roads by using real-time images and detections collected from the hundreds of thousands of Nexar dash cams currently on America’s roads and applying Blyncsy’s proprietary machine learning models to understand the changing road conditions and visibility of pavement markings to create safer road conditions for drivers. 

A similar approach can be used for mapping of the exact location of every stop sign, traffic light, lane line, and curb, data that can also be used to train autonomous vehicles.

“We are proud to partner with Blyncsy using our combined AI smart technology to improve our roads,” said Eran Shir, CEO and co-founder of Nexar. “With many cities investing in expensive lidar technologies to monitor their streets and roads, or human surveyors, the crowdsourced vision data from Nexar ‘sees’ the world at eye-level just like we do and provides superior insights at a fraction of the cost. Pavement monitoring is just one example of Nexar’s value while other cities and businesses are using the data to monitor and understand curb use, real estate trends, pedestrian traffic, construction, and more. Nexar creates a platform that other companies can run their AI on and in some cases applies its own AI, such as work zone detections in the Las Vegas Valley.”

“We know that machine learning is only as strong as the data it depends on,” said Mark Pittman, CEO and founder of Blyncsy. “With this partnership, we’re giving government agencies a magnifying glass for their infrastructure, plus the power of continuous pattern analysis and predictive analytics. We’re excited to see how this combination can impact public servants, communities, and people everywhere.”