TECH NEWS – The goal of the experiment is to reduce traffic, optimise public transportation and support pedestrian safety.

Three trials will start in June to reduce gridlock and pollution from parking; to cut pedestrian accidents; and to minimise crowding on city’s buses, using Sony’s IMX500, which is the first image sensor with embedded AI processing functionality, on-chip processing addresses privacy concerns, and allows it to be rolled out utilising existing infrastructure. The trial seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of such a system, with drivers alerted via a smartphone app before being directed to the free parking space closest to the driver’s destination.

The test also includes a study of smart city systems that will optimise capacity and increase the use of its public transport network by implementing smart bus shelters, counting those getting on and off each bus – identifying overloading to ensure better provisioning of buses and costs optimisation. An alert system at pedestrian crossings will be progressively activated to alert drivers when pedestrians are crossing, using low-latency smart lighting on the road to make them more visible to reduce the city’s accidents on pedestrian crossings.

The IMX500 allows the extraction of real-time metadata related to information of a free parking space, the presence of a pedestrian about to cross a street, or the number of people getting on or off a bus. No images are stored, nor leave the sensor, in line with privacy requirements. All of this allows the city to reduce the bandwidth required to scale it easily using existing networks, and to cut power and communication costs, plus it addresses the citizens’ privacy concerns. Sony uses the SeaaS (Sensing as a Service) business model.

Sony’s imaging and sensing technology can serve social causes in the cities, which demonstrates how the IMX500’s sensors can alleviate some of the problems faced by busy cities. The average distance between pedestrians and vehicles is a key metric used to measure pedestrian safety. The test wants to put together a quantitative analysis of this and prevent pedestrian accidents through signalling mechanisms installed at the crossings. „This is a clear and concrete example where Sony’s smart vision solution can serve our customer’s purpose while respecting people’s privacy. We have a vision of achieving more sustainable and liveable cities, and through the IMX500 scalable platform we can substantially accelerate this process,” Antonio Avitabile, the managing director of corporate alliance and investment at Sony said.

Rome’s city centre has Genius version smart tips. A neural network was trained to identify available parking spaces as well as the number of people waiting at the bus stops, entering or leaving the bus and waiting to cross or crossing the road. Each smart tip has two sensors looking over the roads around and the parking spaces. They send real-time data elaborated by neural networks on the exact location of free space, the pedestrians’ presence and the number of people queuing at bus shelters. This also applies to the exact location of the free parking space data (sensor > neural network) to the cloud software platform of the partner company, Envision. Then, the coordinates of the free parking space’s location are overlaid in real-time on a map, which is then displayed on the driver’s mobile. This solution is also used for the pedestrian’s presence. The neural network system detects pedestrians at the zebra crossing and a lighting signal is sent to the drivers to alert them. The data of queue length and people getting on and off the bus are also treated the same way (sensor > neural network > Envision). Envision‘s platform aggregates them and makes them available to personnel managing the public bus network to enhance the planning and scheduling of the bus transportation network. A „crowded” figure of merit is provided to signal when the bus is running at overcapacity to avoid overcrowded buses, better manage the transportation network and improve citizens’ journey experience.

The trial is conducted in the City of Rome collaboratively by several start-up companies in the Italian ecosystem and with the support of Sony Europe.

Source: Red Lemon press release