Nvidia’s accelerated computing has helped India, its toll traffic, which extends over 4 million miles at 1,000 toll plazas.
The Indian road network is the second largest on the earth and is basically operated manually. Traditional toll plazas, wherever they’re used on the earth, may cause massive traffic delays, long commute times and severe traffic congestion.
To support the automation of toll plazas across India, Indian-American technology company Calsoft helped a client implement a wide selection of Nvidia technologies that were integrated into the country's dominant payment system, generally known as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Manual toll booths require more time and labor than automatic ones. However, automating India's toll systems brings with it a further difficulty: the wide range of license plates.
India's non-standardized license plates pose a big challenge to the accuracy of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR). Any implementation would want to account for these plate variations, which include different colours, sizes, fonts and placement on vehicles, in addition to many alternative languages.
The solution developed by Calsoft mechanically reads the license plates of passing vehicles and debits the respective driver's UPI account. This approach reduces the necessity for manual toll collection and is a giant step towards solving the traffic problem within the region.
Automation in motion
This solution has been rolled out in several leading metropolitan cities as a part of a pilot program. The solution offers roughly 95% accuracy in reading license plates by utilizing an ANPR pipeline that detects and classifies the license plates as they go through the toll plazas.
According to Vipin Shankar, senior vp of technology at Calsoft, Nvidia's technology was crucial on this endeavor. “Detection was particularly difficult at night.
Another challenge was improving model accuracy when pixel distortions occur as a result of environmental conditions akin to fog, heavy rain, reflections from vivid sunshine, dusty winds and more,” he said.
The solution uses Nvidia Metropolis to trace and detect vehicles throughout the method. Metropolis is an application framework, set of developer tools, and partner ecosystem that brings together visual data and AI to enhance operational efficiency and safety across a variety of industries.
Calsoft engineers used Nvidia Triton to deploy and manage their AI models. The team also used the Nvidia DeepStream software development kit to create a real-time streaming platform. This was key to efficiently processing and analyzing data streams and incorporating advanced features akin to real-time object detection and classification.
Calsoft uses Nvidia hardware in its AI solutions, including Nvidia Jetson Edge AI modules and Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Calsoft's toll booth solution can be scalable, meaning it’s designed to accommodate future growth and expansion needs and might higher ensure sustainable performance and flexibility to changing traffic conditions.
