The City of Montreal has picked Kapsch TrafficCom to provide video analytics and connected vehicle technology to provide Vulnerable Road User Awareness. The system will be deployed across nineteen intersections in central Montreal, and employ smart and connected technologies to improve protection from pedestrians and cyclists, as well as identifying traffic congestion and stopped vehicles. The system will also broadcast alerts to drivers using connected vehicle technologies.

Across the Notre Dame corridor and the Montreal city centre, Kapsch TrafficCom will deploy its Orchestrated Connected Corridor (OCC) services suite. OCC uses traffic data from existing video cameras and connected vehicles to provide drivers with real-time notifications about Vulnerable Road Users and traffic authorities with traffic statistics tools.

Orchestrated Connected Corridors are based on a services suite that enables digital transformation for highway and urban environments. They provide a basis for cohesive, consolidated and modular services for increased safety, mobility and sustainability, with the option to expand capabilities in the future as authorities’ needs continue to evolve. OCC’s architecture is designed to enable repeatable and scalable services such as Video Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Decision Support and Demand Management.

The central element of the system is the Deep Learning Versatile Platform (DLVP) video analytics platform. It analyses video feeds from existing cameras and processes it with AI in real time, improving response times to safety-critical events. DLVP is hardware agnostic, meaning that it can process data from various inputs and video formats, resolutions and frame rates. This allows for the solution to rely on existing hardware instead of requiring expensive additional traffic cameras, keeping costs down and enabling a more sustainable approach to traffic management.

While the platform itself can be customised to meet various needs of traffic management, situational awareness and road safety, the system in Montreal is aimed at detecting incidents, classifying vehicles and vulnerable road users (pedestrians & cyclists), wrong-way driving, congestion and other situations that are potentially dangerous.

In the event of an incident, a services dashboard will provide warnings and relevant information to their operators at the City’s traffic management centre. The data from the DLVP will be fed into the Kapsch’s connected corridor management service, the Connected Mobility Control Centre (CMCC), to broadcast specific alerts (congestion, stopped vehicles, pedestrians & bicycles on road) directly with drivers in the vicinity of the incident using connected vehicle technology.

“We are deploying our Orchestrated Connected Corridor with Video Analytics across 19 intersections in Downtown Montreal”, said JB Kendrick, President North America at Kapsch TrafficCom. “Embracing the power of deep learning, we are not only enhancing safety but we also provide city officials with real-time data that can make immediate impacts.”