Traffic cops and tow trucks cause the most irritation among car drivers. What if we give the driver of an incorrectly parked car a chance to find out about the approach of a tow truck and correct the situation? With this idea, we trained the neural network to recognize tow trucks on images from CCTV cameras.
Two years ago, our team started developing and training a neural network for recognizing cars in parking lots. During this time, we have collected a dataset of more than 26 thousand images, connected 376 cameras, 122 parking lots to the car recognition service, of which only 5,400 parking spaces. We have developed a mobile application displaying free and occupied parking spaces, and also created an API that anyone can use to solve business problems.
To date, we have achieved a fairly high recognition accuracy in different weather and external conditions - read about this in the article Belarusian AI service has outstripped Google and Microsoft AI in car recognition .
And so we decided to move on - to recognize the tow trucks. We plan to send the received data by notification to users of the mobile application or dashboard, or to offer new opportunities for video surveillance services.
How do tow trucks differ from cars and trucks?
Platform and crane are key features. If these signs are difficult to recognize, then it is most likely an ordinary truck. At the moment, our neural network recognizes three classes of cars: big cars (bigCars), small cars (smallCars) and tow trucks (towTruck).
By large we mean a car with a view from below, when headlights, shape, mirrors, wheels and other similar signs are visible.
By small we mean a car with a top-down view, with the shape of the car being the key feature.
Tow trucks currently have features similar to small cars, but an important difference is the platform and the crane.
Now we recognize tow trucks only from above or from an angle, mainly data from CCTV cameras from the upper floors of houses. We plan to continue training our neural network on all types of images, so that by taking any picture from the Internet, you can get an accurate result.
For now, these types of images will be recognized as ordinary cars, that is, smallCar or bigCar.
This is our test project and we plan to develop it in more detail depending on the needs of users and business requests. If you have any suggestions on how you can use the detection of tow trucks, then leave a comment or write to info@spotvision.co.
If you would like to test the performance of each car recognition service, here is the link .