IIT Hyderabad patents AI system that monitors riders not wearing a helmet

The Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad has developed a way to automatically detect helmet defaulters using surveillance videos.

Keeping no-helmet-related accidents and deaths in mind, access to CCTV footage and data has been provided after a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the Hyderabad City police and IIT Hyderabad.

The institute is waiting for patent rights to arrive before it can commence production, for which it intends to rope in a major industry partner. The majority of fatal road accidents is due to motorists not wearing helmets or due the helmet being of poor quality.

The motorists without a helmet would trigger a signal, which will then be transmitted to the police department's control room by the software, on a card embedded in the CCTV cameras. This would alert the authorities and help catch the violators.

One of the researchers, Dinesh Singh, said in a report by The Economic Times that the system would be fully automatic along with a web interface allowing the operators to verify the alerts.

It will then be connected to the existing RTO website to generate challans (fines) and send a notification to the riders through SMS. In the future, this system can be adapted to detect other traffic violations as well.

Singh, along with C Krishna Mohan and C Vishnu, developed this artificial intelligence (AI) solution. AI is what analyses the visual information to make this solution work.

Mohan said that a lot of experiments have been conducted on traffic at the IIT campus as well as traffic in Hyderabad City. “We have done significant lab experiments on sparse traffic at the IITH campus as well as dense traffic from Hyderabad City.