Ask HN : Street Vehicle Speed Counter | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN : Street Vehicle Speed Counter

8 pointsmaelito8 comments

Hi HN, given all the work and impressive progress that is going on on the subject of AI, I was wondering if there exists a street vehicle counter mobile app.

One would film the street, visualize the speed of vehicles, and get a report. Kind of what Telraam does, but using our very powerful smartphones, locally, no server subscription needed.

It would also be easy to connect it to a USB battery in a box, to be used by municipalities in order to better know the trafix on a segment of a street, to plan evolutions with a cheap data-based approach. It seems to me that it could be selled to the public sector.

I've found github repositories exposing scripts using YOLO, but nothing ready to use and not really focused on speed.

Have you stumbled upon something similar, or do you have advices on a state of the art library that could make it easy to develop ?

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> using our very powerful smartphones, locally, no server subscription needed.

> connect it to a USB battery in a box

I think these choices would put this idea at a serious disadvantage to other competitors in this space. The reason others are using purpose-built hardware is because it solves problems that repurposed consumer hardware in a box will experience.

Municipalities don't care what your hardware or software stack is. They want to know what problem you're solving for them. If you tell them that you can count traffic to do traffic studies, they're going to tell you that they already bought something 10 years ago that does that. Why would they buy your solution?

If a municipality wants something cheap and offline to count traffic, they can just buy a tube counter today, or use the one they probably already have in their storage room.

Take a look at something like: https://diamondtraffic.com/

It's certainly possible to do, but such solutions already exist for governments and municipalities so I don't really see the point, especially if it's going to be phone with a mobile app and a power bank attached... I'd easily use Telraam instead since it's a polished, proper IoT device and easily scales.

> Kind of what Telraam does, but using our very powerful smartphones, locally, no server subscription needed.

It isn’t 100% clear to me from its site, but doesn’t Telraam run locally, only using its internet connection to upload results for visualization?

https://github.com/Telraam/Telraam-RPi/blob/master/README.md:

“Telraam consists of software on the front-ends (i.e. the Raspberry Pis) and the back-end (our servers that handle both user registration and management as well as advanced clustering and visualisation of measurements).

[…]

Telraam's internal nuts and bolts

[…]

The monitoring script that performs the image processing and data transfers: telraam_monitoring.py”

That's right ! Telraam's code seems to be closed source, though.

And as far as I know, it has to be installed inside, and can't be used handheld on a cheap smartphone.

> It seems to me that it could be selled to the public sector.

Selling to the public sector is a skill in itself. It isn't usually the best product that wins at this... it's the company that knows the most about selling to the public sector.

Interesting research

https://github.com/porscheofficial/speed-estimation-traffic-...

You mean this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_speed_sign ?

Yes, but on a smartphone.

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