Date: February 24, 2006
Time: 2:00 – 3:00 pm
Location: Holmes Hall 244
Speaker: Panos D. Prevedouros, Professor, CEE UHManoa
Modern Freeway Infrastructure and Automated Incident Detection
The presentation will center on the newly constructed Attica Tollway, a 65
mile freeway facility in Athens, Greece. It has state of the art controls,
and management based on Intelligent Transportation Systems. In spring 2005
we run a four month experiment using eight existing surveillance cameras in
tunnels to test three video image processing (VIP) systems for automated
incident detection. Incidents in tunnels (stopped vehicles, fire,
pedestrians, debris, stray animals, liquid spills, etc.) are much more
critical than at wide, open freeway sections. All three vendors (Belgian,
French and US) were present and all three went back to their drawing boards
for substantial revisions.
The trick with automated incident detection is not so much the detection
itself (where many devices do well), but the suppression of false alarms. A
high false alarm rate (1% is high) on a 65 mile facility with 200 cameras
and sensors checking conditions every tenth of the second can produce over
10 alarms per minute. Humans at the control center can’t respond to such a
rate of alarms and 99% of the time all 10 of the alarms are false!