Cities are growing at an astonishing pace worldwide. More than half of the Earth’s population lives in cities nowadays. And that represents certain challenges to those in the regional governments, to keep the urban spaces and services in good condition to provide an adequate environment to all that live in the city. For years now the solution has come from technology, in the form of Smart Cities.

What is a Smart city?

In general, a Smart City is one that uses Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and IoT (Internet of Things) sensors to help run the different operations needed in the city. However, there is no strict definition, as the technology itself is evolving and different uses of it are made in different cities, and so every Smart City can be slightly different from the next one. However, there are many common areas that benefit from the use of technology, despite the different specific uses of those technologies in each case:

  • Energy Grid. Supplying electricity to all the inhabitants and businesses of a city is no mean feat. That is why most Smart Cities use Smart Grid technology, combining a series of energy sources, with a trend in incrementing the sustainable ones.
  • Environment and pollution. The more people that live in a city, the more important air quality becomes. That’s why all of the Smart Cities have sensors over all the metropolitan area to measure CO2, ozone, the water quality and other parameters.
  • Waste disposal. Having several millions of people concentrated in the same area generates a lot of waste, the city has to get rid of. To minimize the logistics involved, there are initiatives with sensors in garbage containers, to optimize the route of the trucks, picking up only full containers, for example.
  • Public transport. Having a good public transport system is vital to reduce overall private traffic and helps driving costs down with optimized routes and timetables, all based on real-time geolocation of the vehicles, for statistical analysis.
  • Traffic. Closely related to the previous item, traffic is one of the main priorities of any city government. Cameras that control traffic density can help to change the timing on traffic lights to improve flow. Or to create fast routes for emergency vehicles.
  • Health. Another major point is the management of all the sanitary and health care infrastructure.
  • Civil protection. This includes disaster alerts & responses for floods, storms, fires, etc. and the management of firefighting forces and the like.
  • Safe City. This is also one of the critical areas and is usually more related to Law Enforcement, but can also include some of the previous areas, like civil protection, traffic management and environment. This includes urban video surveillance.

As we said in the opening, the world population is migrating from rural areas to cities at an unprecedented pace. According to the World Bank, by 2045 there will be 6 billion people living in cities.  The UN has a similar forecast, with 68% of humans living in cities by 2050. This puts pressure on the local administrations of those cities, as they not only have to cope with today’s problems, but also have to be prepared for the growth of the next two decades.

Safe City Iniciatives

Safe City, an AI shield for citizens

Of all the previous areas, city safety is one of the most valued parameters by the citizens, as it determines a big part of everybody’s life. If you want to know the safest cities in the world, have a look at these safety rankings.

One of the most effective (and controversial) initiatives in Safe City is urban video surveillance. Despite privacy concerns it is one of the easiest ways to keep large metropolitan areas under control and provides the ability to react in a timely and directed way. The problem that comes up quite soon when taking this route is that the amount of cameras is just overwhelming to even try some kind of human surveillance. There are just too many cameras in many cities (with China leading these initiatives, see table).

That is why Law Enforcement usually resorts to help in the form of artificial intelligence to be able to have 24/7 surveillance and don’t miss anything of importance. The two main ways are:

  • using intelligent cameras, which have some form of “simple” AI integrated and only send images to the Control Center when something out of the ordinary happens, which reduces the amount of visual information generated. By a lot.
  • using standard cameras, which are connected to a VMS (Video Management System) who is in charge of the recordings and general management of the cameras. However, almost no VMS has AI integrated.

And that is where our Intelion comes into play. It’s a platform for massive and unattended analysis of video and audio. It can work 24/7 on multiple input channels and find all the information Law Enforcement needs or may be interested in: faces, number plates, suspicious movements or actions, etc. On top of that, the system is able to backtrack any element ( number plates, faces, objects) through all the connected cameras and time (recordings) to reconstruct the path a certain vehicle or person have taken before an event (accident, crime, etc.) of interest. Intelion creates reports with all the found information and generates alarms to alert the appropriate officers or people in charge when something of interest is found.

As we said in the opening, the world population is migrating from rural areas to cities at an unprecedented pace. According to the World Bank, by 2045 there will be 6 billion people living in cities.  The UN has a similar forecast, with 68% of humans living in cities by 2050. This puts pressure on the local administrations of those cities, as they not only have to cope with today’s problems, but also have to be prepared for the growth of the next two decades.

Conclusion

Systems like Intelion are the only possible way to keep up with video surveillance in Smart Cities due to the growing number of cameras installed. The unmanageable amount of data is impossible to master manually, so AI has to do the grunt work in order to keep citizens safe and detect any possible problems right from the start 24/7, alerting everybody involved to take action, with all the necessary information.