Cellphones help trap traffic violators in Gurgaon

Policemen use handsets loaded with special software to capture photo evidence of infringements

Pavan Mahanta was recently in a tearing hurry to reach his call centre. He forgot to wear his helmet, but thought he could slip past the policemen during peak hours. But he was stopped near Shankar Chowk, Gurgaon. and without much ado, a policeman whipped out his cellphone, snapped a photo of Mahanta before allowing him to leave. In a couple of weeks, Mahanta received a challan at home, which levied a penalty for the traffic offence.

Mahanta's is not a lone case. Over the last three months, around 150 traffic policemen in Gurgaon have been recording 30-40 violations daily, and routinely sending challans to offenders. They are part of the Gurgaon Traffic Police & Millenium City Welfare Society (a Nasscom initiative) which partnered with handset major Nokia to implement 'Third Eye' (3rdEYE) -- a project to streamline traffic in Gurgaon -- this August.

Each policeman is equipped with a Nokia E5 loaded with ‘Tselina’ software which. according to R Narayan, CEO of Denave India, allows the policemen to capture photo evidence of the traffic violations (like not wearing helmets, illegal parking, overstepping zebra crossings and jumping red lights) including vehicles with the surroundings, license plate and the driver’s face if possible. The photograph is tagged with a time stamp and geo-coordinates, and uploaded onto a database that resides on a server (using the internet) to produce a permanent record of the violation. The police or public can, then, retrieve the photographs at a later stage and use them as evidence to penalise offenders. Narayan adds that the 'Tselina' software is also used in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. It took Denave over 240 man-months "to perfect this two-way tamper proof communication medium".

A Nokia Research Centre paper states that the 'Third Eye' can be used for debugging, monitoring, specification validation, and performance measurements. It has an open architecture allowing easy replacement of third-party tools, including databases, analysis and validation tools. Suresh Vedula, Director Enterprise Sales, Nokia India, says that "the (Third Eye) pilot has been successful and we, along with Denave, hope to evolve this technology further. We keep a daily tab on the violations, and the software is upgraded periodically. There have been around 4,500 traffic violations recorded since we started this project. Around 20-25 per cent of the violators have received challans within two weeks of them commiting an offence. This is a great example of local authorities and the community coming together to use technology as an enabler".

Automating the detection of traffic violations is not a new concept. It has been tried out in many parts of the world with different degrees of success. More than a century back, Popular Mechanics reported on a patent for a "Time Recording Camera for Trapping Motorists" that enabled the operator to take time-stamped images of a vehicle moving across the start and endpoints of a measured section of road. The timestamps enabled the speed to be calculated, and the photo enabled identification of the driver.

Three years back, the European Union launched the Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport (ASSET), a programme aimed at reducing accidents caused by traffic rule violations. It involved a consortium of 19 partner organisations in 12 countries. The ASSET camera can not only catch speeding motorists, but also identify drivers who are not wearing seatbelts and accurately measure distances between moving cars to identify tailgating. The developers hope that by 2013 its cameras will be set up across Europe, including the UK. The system is being tested at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland. Currently, information on offending vehicles is recorded and transmitted to a central database, but all other traffic footage is automatically deleted after one month.

Traffic enforcement cameras are typically automated ticketing machines. They may include a camera which may be mounted beside or over a road or installed in an enforcement vehicle to detect traffic regulation violations, including speeding, vehicles jumping red traffic lights, unauthorised use of a bus lane, or for recording vehicles inside a congestion charge area. The latest automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems can be used for the detection of average speeds but also raise concerns over loss of privacy and the potential for governments to establish mass surveillance of vehicle movements and therefore by association also the movement of the vehicle's owner. In Australia, ANPR technology is used to monitor long distance truck drivers to detect avoidance of legally prescribed driver rest periods. The UK police's ANPR system logs all the vehicles passing particular points in the national road network, allowing authorities to track the movement of vehicles and individuals across the country.

So what's the unique selling point of Nokia's 'Third Eye'? Vedula of Nokia believes "it's end-to-end project management. We are actively involved at every stage, and act as technology consultants". Meanwhile, while Nokia is focusing on scaling up the project to cover Haryana, Vedula says his company has "received a lot of interest" from insurance firms, gram sevikas, and private retailers. He says: "These discussions are underway so I cannot give any details."