The 2018 NVIDIA AI City Challenge

The NVIDIA AI City Challenge has been created to accelerate intelligent video analysis that helps make cities smarter and safer. With millions of traffic video cameras acting as sensors around the world, there is a significant opportunity for real-time and batch analysis of these videos to provide actionable insights. These insights will benefit a wide variety of agencies, from traffic control to public safety. The second edition of the NVIDIA AI City Challenge, being organized as a CVPR workshop, provided a forum to more than 70 academic and industrial research teams to compete and solve real-world problems using traffic camera video data. The Challenge was launched with three tracks — speed estimation, anomaly detection, and vehicle re-identification. Each track was chosen in consultation with traffic and public safety officials based on the value of potential solutions. With the largest available dataset for such tasks, and ground truth for each track, the Challenge enabled 22 teams to evaluate their solutions. Given how complex these tasks are, the results are encouraging and reflect increased value addition year over year for the Challenge

Vehicle Tracking and Speed Estimation from Traffic Videos

The rapid recent advancements in the computation ability of everyday computers have made it possible to widely apply deep learning methods to the analysis of traffic surveillance videos. Traffic flow prediction, anomaly detection, vehicle re-identification, and vehicle tracking are basic components in traffic analysis. Among these applications, traffic flow prediction, or vehicle speed estimation, is one of the most important research topics of recent years. Good solutions to this problem could prevent traffic collisions and help improve road planning by better estimating transit demand. In the 2018 NVIDIA AI City Challenge, we combine modern deep learning models with classic computer vision approaches to propose an efficient way to predict vehicle speed. In this paper, we introduce some state-of-the-art approaches in vehicle speed estimation, vehicle detection, and object tracking, as well as our solution for Track 1 of the Challenge

Mapping Informal Settlements in Developing Countries using Machine Learning and Low Resolution Multi-spectral Data

Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), require detailed maps of the locations of informal settlements. However, data regarding informal and formal settlements is primarily unavailable and if available is often incomplete. This is due, in part, to the cost and complexity of gathering data on a large scale. To address these challenges, we, in this work, provide three contributions. 1) A brand new machine learning data-set, purposely developed for informal settlement detection. 2) We show that it is possible to detect informal settlements using freely available low-resolution (LR) data, in contrast to previous studies that use very-high resolution (VHR) satellite and aerial imagery, something that is cost-prohibitive for NGOs. 3) We demonstrate two effective classification schemes on our curated data set, one that is cost-efficient for NGOs and another that is cost-prohibitive for NGOs, but has additional utility. We integrate these schemes into a semi-automated pipeline that converts either a LR or VHR satellite image into a binary map that encodes the locations of informal settlements.Comment: Published at the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, ethics and society. Extended results from our previous workshop: arXiv:1812.0081