The city of Bellevue is asking for the public's help to make streets safer using new technology.
Bellevue is working with Microsoft and the University of Washington on a cutting-edge effort to help prevent traffic deaths and serious injuries from crashes.
The city needs the public's help to analyze videos. Using the software, the public helps teach the computer to recognize various objects such as cars, pedestrians and bicycles.
It is part of a nationwide effort called "Video Analytics Towards Vision Zero," to reduce traffic fatalities.
Right now, the public's help is needed to teach the computer to recognize objects. A person clicks on the screen and puts a box around an object and adds a label for it. Eventually, instead of a person watching videos, computer algorithms will be able to analyze live footage in real-time.
"Computer vision algorithms applied to video feeds from traffic cameras have a huge potential of improving traffic flow and reducing traffic crashes and fatalities," said Dr. Victor Bahl, the director of the Mobility and Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research. "We are working diligently on this because we truly believe the societal impact will be signifcant.”
According to the city of Bellevue, last year there were 433 traffic incidents with injuries. There were 47 pedestrian incidents, including one person killed in a downtown intersection, and there were 39 bicycle crashes, according to city statistics.
Lorraine Stewart was hit on her bicycle in Bellevue last April in Newport Hills. She was struck from behind and has lasting injuries. She helped launch the high-tech effort on Thursday at Bellevue City Hall. "If there's anything I can do to prevent accidents, that's something I want to be a part of," said Stewart.
The data collection and analysis will help identify near-miss incidents so traffic engineers can make changes to intersections before there's a deadly accident.
[ To help analyze the videos, click here. ]
"The more people who participate in this crowd sourcing process, the more adept the computer vision systems will be," said Franz Loewenherz, the Principal Planner for City of Bellevue Transportation.