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Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

cvilletomorrow.org

101–110 of 138 posts

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#101

I don't know if people share this opinion, but to me speeding is due to the inadequacy and inconsistency of speed limits. Near my home there is a major thoroughfare with a 35 MPH speed limit. It has no homes facing the road, just a few fenced backyards some fair distance away but mostly it has farms, ponds, and golf courses. People regularly go 40-50 MPH down this road. Another major road that crosses this one has a…

Sounds about right. I'd add, I want the app that tells me in a HUD what the speed limit actually is. Maybe an audible boop if I cross the line. Help me actually try to be in conformance when I think that's helpful.

This exists in many non-Google/Apple smartphone navigation apps. HERE maps (formerly Nokia HERE maps) has it with configurable over-speed limits (in addition to its freely downloadable offline maps, with points of interest). The HUD aspect is a bit more difficult to muster at the moment.

https://maps.here.com/

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#102
post #4

Welcome to the age of nitpicking busybodies. Next month, he'll have a facial recognition system for dog walkers who fail to curb their dog.

Count me in as a "nitpicking busybody", though I'd hardly equate dog walking offenses with the kind of damage a speeding driver in a residential neighborhood can cause.

Speeding in a subdivision is annoying to those who live in the subdivision -- it adds to the noise and makes it a pain to get out of the driveway in reverse -- but it's way more than that when you have young children, especially when they have disabilities as one of mine does.

My daughter is hard of hearing (not deaf, but requires hearing aids) and is exceptionally ADD. Last year, she was playing with a basketball in our driveway and it slipped out of her hands and into the street. Mom and I were on the porch when we saw her go after a basketball, we got up running and were screaming at her. She didn't notice us or the car as she emerged from behind a parked car into the street chasing her ball. The driver ran over the ball and narrowly missed hitting her (also narrowly missed the neighbor's big brick mailbox as he swerved). He didn't slow down, just swerved and continued on at a breakneck speed. The kids are no longer allowed to play in the front yard.

Now, sometimes residential roads are indistinguishable from main roads -- lane markers and such can make it easy to speed "by accident". This is not the case in my subdivision. We have a large marquee indicating the name of the subdivision and a posted speed limit (25 MPH) sign. It's all houses, tightly packed, except for an elementary school. Because of a light with poor timing that causes a back-up on the main road, our subdivision is used as a bypass during Rush Hour.

I set up an RPi connected camera to help me make the case for increased enforcement after my daughter was nearly hit by a speeding driver. Two-thirds of the cars appear to be going well over 25 MPH and over half are going so fast it's obvious they're going 15 MPH over the speed limit.

I doubt anyone is in such a hurry that they're consciously choosing the safety of residents of my neighborhood over their 1/2-minute reduction in travel time to their destination, but their actions are just that. I'll be adding this feature to the software I use to track traffic in my neighborhood. I might even go so far as to shame the worst of the drivers (mostly 16-17 year-olds). I even toyed with the idea of setting up a sign that lights up a "Slow Down" message when a car is obviously speeding, but I'm betting that'd run afoul of local ordinances. Incidentally, I had tried to get a "Deaf Child/Disabled Child" sign put up, but I was told the township no longer does this and given the dubious excuse that "they provide a false sense of security" (no -- "they're expensive" or "we're tired of having to change them when the wording is decided to be 'politically-incorrect' every few months" is the problem -- they still put up "Pedestrian Crossing" and other related signs and they still maintain the existing ones when they get knocked over).

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#103
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 MPH ? That's ridiculous, elsewhere it is 10% because that is the legal requirement of the speedometer

You're also relying on the reflexes of someone who is sitting in their car literally watching traffic for hours at a time. The state police can use radar so the floor goes down to 6 over the limit if they are enforcing.

So now you're telling me the police check speeding by eye. Jeepers !

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#104

I don't know if people share this opinion, but to me speeding is due to the inadequacy and inconsistency of speed limits. Near my home there is a major thoroughfare with a 35 MPH speed limit. It has no homes facing the road, just a few fenced backyards some fair distance away but mostly it has farms, ponds, and golf courses. People regularly go 40-50 MPH down this road. Another major road that crosses this one has a…

Sounds about right. I'd add, I want the app that tells me in a HUD what the speed limit actually is. Maybe an audible boop if I cross the line. Help me actually try to be in conformance when I think that's helpful.

When I was using HERE maps on windows phone previously, it would always display the current speed limit and make a noise when you exceeded the speed limit. It's a feature I miss now that I'm back in android with google maps

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#105

I'd love to catch all the people who don't clean up after their dogs here on the streets of the Netherlands. This is a high-tech country, they should do something like this to remove a well-known public annoyance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-35363991

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#106

Some commenters here are commenting as if speeding is some petty thing that doesn't matter. Speeding kills. Something as small as 10 miles over a 30mph may mean a doubling in fatality rate for pedestrians and bicyclists. One source: https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...

Not all speeding is created equal. I agree that 10 miles over a 30 mph zone is probably deadly, if it was properly zoned and not a money-grabbing move (it looks from the article that it was a correct limit, maybe even too high). However, many speeding tickets (at least in my country and others) are due to low maximum speeds on roads intended as main thoroughfares. I read here in HN that plenty of U.S. towns live off…

The safety here is not on or off. Each increment of speed causes a corresponding increase of risk. That increase might be small, but that misses the point.

The speed limits are a social contract. If someone feels they should increase the risk to others above and beyond that agreement then they can at least fund some civic infrastructure to balance things out.

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#108
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally it seems you may photograph and film public property, assuming you believe Wikipedia.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#Public...

This wouldn't fly at all in Germany. If your surveillance camera films public ground, even if it's not the primary object being photographed, you're acting illegally. If, for example, you're trying to monitor your front door to catch a potential burglar and you can see the pavement and the people on it on the video, that's not allowed. You won't be able to use the footage in court even if it shows the burglar clearly…

I'm not surprised because Germany seems to be known as a country with one of the highest privacy regulations, going above and beyond what the EU mandates[1]. The 2009 amendment to the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz[2] is quite comprehensive. Working with German companies on technology projects has made me acutely aware of this.

However, it seems many other countries do allow public photography and filming within reasonable limits. On a side tangent, I wonder if this means that German media uses many less public crowd shots than non-German media channels, if only because of the stricter privacy laws that would require individual consent for any person showing up in the image or frame.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130625-your-private-data-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesdatenschutzgesetz

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#109
post #72
post #65

I was assuming from the title that he was going to actually track down the speeders using OCR on their license plate. Cool read though

Presumably that's next via Tesseract + OpenCV. There's even a license plate library called OpenALPR[1] already available that the professor is probably itching to use if he ever gets city approval. [1] https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

Just needs to get the right angle for the camera. I don't know if he'd need any approval for capturing. Looking up license plates/acting on the data could get one into trouble I imagine though.

Re: Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the retiree condo commanders going around measuring people's shrubs to make sure they comply with condo bylaws section 4, subsection 65, paragraph 5. For some people, ubiquitous rule enforcement is a utopia, not a Orwellian nightmare.

You're seriously equating speeding on a road on which a child has been killed by a speeding vehicle to keeping shrubs tidy?

My guess is that 99.9% of the people on the road exceeding the speed limit this morning are not going to kill a child (or hurt anyone) with their car today just from speeding. It could be 99.99%. I don't have the statistics, but there are probably a lot of 9's there. No matter what that number is, there are already laws against hitting kids with your car. Enforce them. Why do we need to ruthlessly enforce something that the majority of drivers do and in most cases does not result in injury?

What I'm equating is the mental state of the busybody: The need to go out looking for rules being broken that otherwise would, in all likelihood, go unnoticed.

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