AI to make roads in India safer to drive
Author: BI Bureau
New Delhi: Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered solutions may soon make roads in India a safer place to drive. A unique AI approach that uses the predictive power of AI to identify risks on the road, and a collision alert system to communicate timely alerts to drivers, to make several improvements related to road safety, is being implemented in Nagpur City with an objective of resulting in a significant reduction of accidents.
The project ‘Intelligent Solutions for Road Safety through Technology and Engineering’ (iRASTE) at Nagpur will identify potential accident-causing scenarios while driving a vehicle and alert drivers about the same with the help of the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). The project will also identify ‘greyspots’, i.e., by data analysis and mobility analysis by continuously monitoring dynamic risks on the entire road network. Greyspots are locations on roads, which left unaddressed could become blackspots (locations with fatal accidents). The system also conducts continuous monitoring of roads and designs engineering fixes to correct existing road blackspots for preventive maintenance and improved road infrastructure.
The iRASTE project is under by the I-Hub Foundation, IIIT Hyderabad, a Technology Innovation Hub (TIH), set up in the technology vertical - Data Banks and Data Services supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under its National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) along with INAI (Applied AI Research Institute). The project consortium includes CSIR-CRRI, and Nagpur Municipal Corporation, with Mahindra and Intel as the industry partners.
The Hub is working to coordinate, integrate, and amplify basic and applied research in broad data-driven technologies as well as its dissemination and translation across the country. One of the primary aims is to prepare a critical resource for the future use by researchers, startups, and industry, mainly in the areas of smart mobility, healthcare along with smart buildings.
What makes the iRASTE project even more unique is that AI and technology is being applied to create practical solutions, as a blueprint, for Indian conditions. While the initial rollout of iRASTE is in Nagpur, the eventual goal is to replicate the solution in other cities too. Currently, talks are on with the Telangana government to adopt the technology in a fleet of buses that ply on highways. There are further plans to extend the scope of iRASTE to Goa and Gujarat also.
I-Hub Foundation has also used techniques ranging from machine learning, computer vision and computational sensing for several other data-driven technological solutions in the mobility sector. One such solution is the India Driving Dataset (IDD), a dataset for road scene understanding in unstructured environments captured from Indian roads, which stands out by deviating from the worldwide assumptions of well-delineated infrastructure such as lanes, limited traffic participants, low variation in object or background appearance and strong adherence to traffic rules.
The dataset, a first of its kind, consists of 10,000 images, finely annotated with 34 classes collected from 182 drive sequences on Indian roads obtained from a front-facing camera attached to a car driven around Hyderabad, Bangalore, and their outskirts. The dataset is released in the public domain for unrestricted use under public license and is becoming a de facto dataset for all analysis on Indian road scenes. Currently, there are over 5000 registered users for this dataset across the world.
Another dataset called Open World Object Detection on Road Scenes (ORDER) has also been developed using the India Driving Dataset that could be used by autonomous navigation systems in Indian driving conditions for localization and classification of the objects in a road scene. Besides this, a Mobility Car Data Platform (MCDP) has been designed with several sensors – cameras, LIDARs, with necessary compute for anyone to capture or process data on the car that can help researchers and start-ups in India test their automotive algorithms and approaches in navigation and research on Indian roads.
LaneRoadNet (LRNet), a new framework with an integrated mechanism considering lane and road parameters using deep learning, has been designed to address problems of Indian roads, which have several obstacles, occluded lane markings, broken dividers, cracks, potholes, etc. that put the drivers at significant risk while driving. In this framework, a road quality score is calculated with the help of a modular scoring function. The final score helps the authorities to assess road quality and prioritize maintenance schedules of the road so as to improve the drivability.
In order to help local self-government institutions employ suitable rejuvenation methods in tree starved streets, I-Hub Foundation designed a framework for street tree detection, counting and visualization that uses object detectors and a matching counting algorithm. The work has paved the way for a quick, accurate, and inexpensive way to recognize tree-starved streets. /BI/
More In Tech Governance
The exports of agricultural commodities from March to June 2020 shot up by 23.24 percent on-year to Rs 25,552.7 crores.
As the economy comes to a standstill amid the coronavirus-led lockdown, India’s agriculture sector has taken the baton of economic growth in its hands. The exports of agricultural commodities from March to June 2020 shot up by 23.24 percent on-year to Rs 25,552.7 crores, according to the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare. The government said that self-reliant agriculture is critical for the goal of an Atmanirbhar Bharat and for this, agricultural export is extremely important as besides earning foreign exchange for the country, the exports help farmers, producers, and exporters to take advantage of the wider international market and increase their income.
The surge in exports has also resulted in increased production in the farm sector by increasing coverage area and productivity. The share of India’s agricultural exports and imports in the world agriculture trade in 2017 was 2.27 percent and 1.90 percent, respectively. Even during the difficult time of pandemic lockdown, India took care not to disturb the world food supply chain and continued to export, the government said.
Ministry of Agriculture has prepared a comprehensive action plan for the promotion of Agri trade; the twofold approach focuses on boosting Agri Export with emphasis on value addition and action plan for Import Substitution. Recently, the Agriculture sector has witnessed a series of reforms, giving more choices to the farmers to sell their produce at competitive rates.
To mention a few, the Export strategy focuses on the export promotion of fast-evolving niche markets of Wellness food/ Health-conscious food/nutraceuticals, Development of “Brand India” in campaign mode to help penetration into new foreign markets and of new products which automatically translates into higher value realization, Gulf countries have been identified as focus destination to increase the market share which is a strong market for India though presently India caters to only 10-12% share of their total imports. A product-market matrix has been made containing a list of products of strength that could be expanded in new geographies and a list of known markets which can be introduced with newer products.
At the behest of the Department of Agricultural Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture, product-specific Export Promotion Forums have been created to lead Agri exports to new heights. Each Export Promotion Forum shall be having exporters of the related commodity as its members along with official members representing concerned Ministries/Departments of the Central and State Governments. Chairman APEDA shall be the chairman of each of these forums. The forums will meet at least once every two months, to discuss recommendations on issues pertaining to the export.
The recommendations of the forum will be placed in the product committee / Authority of APEDA. The Forum will keep in close contact with the concerned organization of the Ministry of Agriculture such as MIDH, Extension, NPPO, etc., DGFT, Ministry of Civil Aviation, MoFPI, etc. to further the interest of agricultural export.
