It’s said that nothing is certain, except death and taxes. Let’s add a third certainty to that list: traffic.

All across the globe, traffic engineers and city planners are locked in an eternal struggle to improve the flow of traffic, the efficiency of streets and the safety of pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. Finding the best way to meet these goals requires an enormous amount of data, which is often difficult to collect and analyze.

Two Arizona State University entrepreneurs are making this data easier to understand and access. Mohammad Farhadi and Yezhou Yang founded Argos Vision, a tech startup developing smart traffic cameras that can passively capture, analyze and deliver droves of data to help cities improve road safety and efficiency.

The pair created a self-contained, solar-powered traffic camera that uses on-board computer vision, a type of artificial intelligence, to identify and classify what it sees.

“We identified three major things we wanted to accomplish with this technology,” says Farhadi. “Cost reduction, privacy protection and rich metadata extraction.”

Installing traffic cameras can be costly to local governments. Closing intersections to add new power and network cable to existing infrastructure is a lengthy and expensive process. Argos Vision solves this financial roadblock with a self-contained camera system that runs off solar power and transmits data over a cellular network.

Read More: https://www.phoenix.gov/newsroom/street-transportation/2420