Technological Knowledge Platform in The Danish Road Directorate’s Cars for Safeguarding of the Biodiversity
The biodiversity on the state roads in Scandinavia is threatened. Many species are on the verge of extermination. Invasive plants such as bear’s claw, golden rice, lupins, and wrinkled rose create difficult conditions for the biodiversity. At the same time traffic-killed animals require many resources to find and collect. To optimize the resources at The Danish Road Directorate Develco and Trifork have been responsible for product development of hardware and software for a technological knowledge platform.
The technological product solution continuously takes photos of plants and animals on the state roads and thereby contributes to locating invasive plants and dead animals, which are subsequently removed by The Danish Road Directorate’s biologists. In this way the technology solution ensures free and unhindered movement for the wildlife and the biodiversity with roadsides rich in species.
In the development project with the knowledge platform for the cars there have been some challenges with the photo shoots during the process:
- High speed on the state roads
- Photo shoots of license plates and faces from passing cars
- Fluctuating internet coverage
But now the technological knowledge platform is ready for use in The Danish Road Directorate’s cars and consists of:
- Physical Hardware
- Software with Artificial Intelligence AI
- Human Data Analysis
The technology solution is used on The Danish Road Directorate’s cars in Denmark and on similar cars in Sweden and Iceland. Soon the solution will also be implemented in Germany.
Camera Box with Computer and GPS
Develco has developed the physical hardware with a camera box mounted on The Danish Road Directorate’s cars with a Thule stand fitting all car models. The box contains two cameras, a computer with high graphic processing power, a gateway with GSM communication to the Cloud, a power supply, and a GPS tracker to identify the location of the invasive plants and dead animals on the roads.
Software with Artificial Intelligence AI
With the camera boxes on the cars The Danish Road Directorate can take 41 pictures per second of the state roads and transmit data with photo recordings on to a Cloud solution developed by Trifork.
Trifork has also developed the software with Artificial Intelligence AI for the knowledge platform. The software is run on the computer in the camera box on The Danish Road Directorate’s cars. The AI model analyzes the images while driving the cars and can distinguish and process the recorded photos of plants and animals on the roads. The software blurs cars and people in the photo recordings and transmits only relevant photos of invasive plant species and dead animals to the Cloud. At the same time the software deletes all other photo recordings from the roads.
Human Data Analysis of Photo Recordings
In the Cloud solution The Danish Road Directorate analyzes the photo recordings and ensures that the invasive plants and dead animals are removed from the roads. In the past The Danish Road Directorate drove several thousand kilometers every week as a standard to accidentally keep an eye on invasive plants and dead animals on the state roads. With the new technological knowledge platform in the cars The Danish Road Directorate has obtained an optimal solution for systematic monitoring of plants and animals on and along the roads instead of accidental monitoring.
PRODUCT FACTS
- 2 Cameras with Full HD Resolution, 41 Frames per Second
- 12mm none Distortion Lens System
- Lenovo SE70 Computer Built on NVIDIA Jetson GPU
- Internal LAN 16Gbps (None-Blocking) Bandwidth
- 48Channel GPS Receiver for Positioning
- GSM Gateway 4G and 5G
- 12Vdc Power Distribution System with Noise Filtering
- Camera and Main Casing IP67
- Thule Car Mounting System from Sweden
