Automated asset inspection with ML

I tuned in for a particularly interesting presentation as part of Smart Cities Summit 2021 yesterday. Some amazing work being done by Moreton Bay Regional Council and Retina Visions on automated visual asset inspection. They are leveraging their existing garbage collection vehicles to acquire video footage of the road and roadside during their rounds, and processing that video to identify all kinds of maintenance issues.

From road defects including cracking to curbside rubbish to overhanging trees - all detected automatically and fed directly into the council asset management system and used to dispatch maintenance crews.

I also noted a great use of edge AI - to mitigate privacy issues, both faces and license plates are detected on the acquisition device and blurred as the footage is acquired. The redacted footage is then sent back to the cloud for the gruntier processing work of detecting and classifying the defect types. In this way it’s possible to leverage the huge processing power in the cloud whilst ensuring that sensitive data never leaves the truck.

It’s a really inspiring example of a council embracing new technology to reduce costs and improve services for their community.

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