Silicon Valley-based smart lidar provider Cepton and fibre-optics systems house Fibre Based Integrations are working together to develop lidar-based vehicle detection in Cape Town, South Africa, to enable citywide smart transportation infrastructure.

This joint effort combines South Africa-based Fibre Based Integrations’ expertise in optics system integration and Cepton’s lidar technologies to help the cty of Cape Town monitor lane usage and identify vehicles using incorrect lanes.

Fibre Based Integrations has deployed vehicle classification systems on traffic lights at intersections and overhead devices that use Cepton’s Helius SmartLidar system with Vista-P lidar sensors.

Many of Cape Town’s roads have designated bus lanes to ensure the efficiency of public transportation, and Fibre Based Integrations’ lidar-enabled systems will allow the city technology department to gather accurate, real-time lane usage data to enable analytics that help identify ways to improve traffic flow and safety for motorists and pedestrians.

By using lidar’s perception capabilities, the systems can provide useful information such as vehicle size, traffic volume, frequency, lane positioning and potential obstructions. Based on this information, system operators can gain insight about how a specific intersection or piece of road is being used, including unauthorised vehicle types in designated bus lanes, peak traffic time windows, real-time lane occupancy status, wait time at traffic lights and accident-prone areas.

“The reason we chose to deploy lidars in our vehicle detection and classification systems is their superior accuracy,” said Josh Goosen, system engineer at Fibre Based Integrations. “We have previously tested radars and some other types of sensors, and we found that they lack the resolution needed to accurately locate and count vehicles and provide accurate 3D information about their sizes and speeds. We found Cepton lidars to be the best performing and most accurate compared with others we tested, and this has unlocked new possibilities with the city of Cape Town.”

Lidar technology has come to play an increasingly important role in the smart cities sector. It brings higher accuracy and efficiency to existing sensor technologies to help the overall system eliminate detection errors. Lidars offer a higher spatial resolution than radars, and perform better than cameras in various weather and lighting conditions to provide high-accuracy data round the clock.

Lidars also help protect people’s privacy as they do not capture biometric information, making them suitable in venues where cameras might raise privacy concerns. The addition of lidars to smart city applications helps effectively reduce false negatives and false positives, while making systems more data efficient.

Cepton’s lidars use a patented imaging technology called micro motion technology (MMT) to help system integrators increase the benefit of the lidar technology. The rotation-free, mirrorless and frictionless MMT design makes the lidars reliable, rugged and compact, which in turn offers ease of integration and affordability for scalable applications.

In the deployment by Fibre Based Integrations, the Vista-P lidar sensors are interconnected through the Helius perception software, creating a network of smart lidar sensors to offer real-time detection, tracking and classification of vehicles and pedestrians. This enables extendable smart transportation infrastructure that collects and analyses traffic data from different locations, while helping optimise its overall bandwidth allocation, as lidars output only a fragment of the data volume output from video camera alternatives.

Fibre Based Integrations and the city of Cape Town are also exploring using Cepton’s lidars to augment the city’s analogue and video systems with an additional layer of functionality and performance. The aim is to blend human and vehicle classification, enabled by lidar, with an AI platform to understand how both interact with the city environment. This should help collect useful information for traffic management and urban planning through machine learning, while reducing disruption to people’s daily lives.

“If our cities are to become smarter, then plug-and-play solutions like the ones we have created with Fibre Based Integrations must play a vital role in helping them do so,” said Klaus Wagner, director of product management at Cepton. “Lidar has the ability to make people’s everyday lives easier even without them being fully aware of it, and that is what makes smart transport systems so intelligent. We look forward to continuing our work with Fibre Based Integrations in our effort to make Cape Town and other cities in South Africa safer. We also believe that by enabling a higher level of traffic efficiency, we can help cities build a greener environment.”

Founded in 2016 and led by industry veterans with decades of collective experience across lidar and imaging technologies, Cepton is focused on the mass market commercialisation of high-performance lidar. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has a centre of excellence facility in Troy, Michigan, to provide local support to the OEM and tier one-studded Metro Detroit area. It also has a presence in Germany, Canada, Japan, India and China.

Fibre Based Integrations is an established fibre optic systems house serving major project houses and end users in the telecommunications, CCTV, process and datacomms industry.