Using technology we can solve any problems, it’s just a matter of time to get together.
We at Giscle are committed to solve problems irrespective of so the difficulties that come our way. We remember, during our open house session, we got a question and that was, how Giscle will manage potholes on Indian roads? We started thinking about potholes and we were able to figure out that potholes is a big problem. Not only potholes in reality, the design of Indian roads is a big problem. Because it is extremely hard to find and track these locations.
At most of the places, traffic signals are not working, at many places, old broken traffic signals have not been fixed. In general, it usually takes many months to fix traffic signals, potholes etc.
Now, the real question is, should we compromise with this problem as we have been doing or should we get together and try to fix this? For a while, we can say that this is the work of Government, which is true, but the problem is, Government can’t think about the usability of technology for solving real world problems. That is why, startups have been respected in the world, because they solve the problems for everyone as they believe in technology and know which technology is to be used for solving which problem.
We released a mapping tool last year in November with the idea behind the mapping tool to make the city more safer and independent from potholes, broken traffic signals etc. Thanks to OfferCam users, we collected about 400 KM of road data. While, we were working with the data, we figured out many things, but as usual, we started with one problem and that was POTHOLES.
We extracted all the potholes frames from crowd sourced video data, and since we didn’t have that much data, we were able to collect about 400 pothole frames. We applied transfer learning, and our model was able to detect the potholes. You can see some our output results.
Potholes detection is only a small part of Indian road problems. If we will able to collect more data, we will be able to fix all the problems related to roads.
Other things we can detect include:
- Broken traffic signals
- Work in progress zones
- Accident zones
- Accidental cross-sections
- Damaged traffic lights
- Any other irregularities related to road
But these things will be only possible if you will help us in collecting the data. Start contributing in making our city better in four steps. It is extremely easy to use our mapping app as it is an Android App.
- Download OfferCam from Google Play store
- Open OfferCam app
- Fix OfferCam app with your navigation mobile holder
- Start recording using “STARTUP TRIP” button
- You can stop recording any point of time using Stop button
- Once you finish recording, you can upload using UPLOAD VIDEO
We all travel a lot, it’s time to make our all travel impactful for million other people. Your small contribution will save many lives and make our cities beautiful and traffic free.
What next ?
Please share this article to NGOs (Working in the field of road safety), State road &traffic departments etc.
PS: The idea behind detecting potholes is not to showcase the world about Indian bad road infrastructure. The only reason we trained potholes detection is to highlight, using technology we can solve any problems. It’s just a matter of time to get together and commit to solve that problem.
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