India has the second-largest road network in the world, consisting of approximately 4 million miles of roads and over a thousand toll booths. Even though most of the tollbooths are operated manually.
Manual tollbooths contribute to massive traffic delays, long commute times, and serious road congestion. This is a global issue, not just an Indian one.
But there is a solution.
An Indian-American technology company, Calsoft, utilized a broad spectrum of NVIDIA technologies in implementing the automated tollbooths across India. This system has been integrated with the dominant payment system in India, UPI (Unified Payments Interface), for smoother and quicker toll collection.
Why does this matter?
Manual tollbooths require more time and labor. Automating the toll systems in India is not very easy, as India has so much diversity in terms of license plates. It is really challenging for an automated number plate recognition (ANPR) system to track the non-standardized plates with various colors, sizes, fonts, and languages.
This is what Calsoft's solution resolves. The system reads the vehicle plates automatically and charges a driver's UPI account. It is definitely a game changer in reducing congestion.
Automation in Action
Already, in many major metropolitan cities, this solution is operational under a pilot program. The system provides accuracy of about 95% through the ANPR pipeline with detection and classification of plates as they pass tollbooths.
Thus, the role of NVIDIA technology proved to be crucial under challenging conditions, for example, nighttime detection; adverse weather impacts, for example, fog, heavy rain, and reflections from bright sunlight. The solution will use NVIDIA Metropolis in the process of tracking and detection of vehicles. Calsoft also incorporated NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software to control AI models, in addition to the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK to develop real-time streaming platform. Summary: In simple words, Calsoft's scalable solution, powered by NVIDIA, is driving the revolution of toll booth automation in India, paving the way for quicker and efficient traffic management.
Image Credit: Business Today