The municipal company OICT will start testing the use of image analysis technology and artificial intelligence for regular monitoring of public space, which will detect deviations from the initial state and evaluate their severity. The collected data will serve the metropolis to streamline and improve the management of public space. This follows from the contract, which was approved by the Prague councillors at the beginning of the week.
The pilot project focuses on designing, building and testing the system on vehicles that normally move on the streets of Prague and serve a specific purpose. These are, for example, garbage, delivery and other vehicles. These will be equipped with a portable system including camera and position sensors with a computing unit and a data transfer module. Thanks to this, the capital city of Prague will obtain data that will be used to analyse the state of Prague's streets.
"Managing Prague based on data makes sense. Smart technologies will now directly collect additional new anonymized data in the field, which can not only improve traffic through the city, but will also help increase safety in the case of Prague ambulance vehicles passing through or with the quality of public space around waste containers," says the Mayor of Prague Zdeněk Hřib.
"We see the benefit of the project in the fact that with the help of smart technology installed on cars that are already regularly driving in the streets of Prague, even outside the paid parking zones, we will obtain a whole range of data. We will create an analytical and visualization interface on top of them, to which other city companies will have access. They will then use the data for more efficient administration, increasing safety on city roads or spatial planning," says Tomáš Barczi, CEO of OICT, which implements innovative projects for the capital.
"Using artificial intelligence, neural learning and computer vision, the system will be able to identify the required information in real time and during normal operation. The fundamental advantage, of course, is that it will manage for an unlimited time and without human intervention. The project will allow us, among other things, to continuously and in real time monitor the width of the rescue lane for the vehicles of the integrated rescue service, poorly parked vehicles blocking, for example, waste collection or the clutter around the containers for sorted waste," explains OICT project manager Vojtěch Štěch.
The project supports the fulfilment of goals within the Plan for Sustainable Mobility of Prague and its surroundings, specifically in the area of the plan's impacts, i.e. indicators of the transport system, costs and revenues of mobility and spatial planning. The project is also part of the implementation of the Smart Prague concept until 2030. In the Zlatý erb 2022 (Golden Coat of Arms 2022) competition, the expert jury awarded the project 3rd place.
