Leveraging Computer Vision For Effective Crowd Management In Smart Cities

Government organizations can implement computer vision in smart cities to maintain social distancing and avoid stampedes and other disasters in crowded areas.

As the global population continues to grow at an alarming rate, crowd management becomes an increasingly challenging task. The global population is reportedly projected to reach 8 billion in 2025. Global trends also indicate that the population in urban areas has been growing steadily over several years. This suggests crowd management can be even more difficult in urban areas. Government organizations can tackle this issue effectively by developing smart cities that use multiple cameras, low-power sensors, and artificial intelligence. Combining these tools with computer vision can make smart cities even more advanced. By implementing computer vision in smart cities, governments can precisely monitor public places and create strategies for effective crowd management.

Government organizations and authorities can use computer vision in smart cities to identify people and objects, assess the motion of vehicles and predict congestions, detect crowded areas, and more. Furthermore, computer vision applications will offer real-time insights that will assist governments in making decisions for smart cities. Smart cities are already benefiting from computer vision by implementing smart parking systems and maintaining law and order. Crowd management will be another major use case for computer vision in smart cities.

Applications of Computer Vision in Smart Cities

Here’s how governments can utilize computer vision in smart cities:

Maintaining Social Distancing

Ensure Social Distancing Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare experts around the world have advised us to ensure social distancing of at least 6 ft along with wearing masks. However, it can be quite difficult to maintain social distancing in crowded cities. In this case, smart cities can use computer vision to plan their infrastructure to ensure social distancing in crowded places. For instance, Numina has developed a computer vision-powered tool that offers multi-object tracking in smart cities. The company had tweeted a video that shows how New Yorkers were trying to practice social distancing, but the narrow sidewalk space made it a daunting task. Governments can use such real-time data to identify issues that could be overlooked.

Avoiding Stampedes in Crowded Areas

Government organizations can use computer vision in smart cities to monitor crowded events like concerts and live sports venues where chances of stampedes are quite high. In these scenarios, computer vision will provide real-time estimates like the number of people and crowd density. Such data can be used to avoid stampedes and other disasters as well as assist in controlling the crowd.

Although the implementation of computer vision in smart cities can be effective in crowd control, many of us would be concerned about the invasion of privacy. Citizens of most countries will be worried about their governments using advanced technologies to gather real-time visual data about them. To address this issue, governments need to develop a proper framework to ensure that sensitive data can be accessed only by select high-level officials and that such data will not be misused.