National Highways has a contract in place to ‘actively explore’ the use of video analytics to enhance its failing stopped vehicle detection (SVD) technology on smart motorways, Highways has learned.
Highways revealed last November that the government-owned company had successfully tested a CCTV-based video analytics system that could identify stranded vehicles in live lanes in all conditions, but was not taking it forward.
In December, a report by the Office of Rail and Road revealed that National Highways had ‘made this framework dormant due to the pause of the smart motorway programme’.
With the roll-out of new smart motorways cancelled, Highways asked the Department for Transport and National Highways whether attempts to develop a CCTV-based alternative would be resumed.
The DfT said National Highways remains open to exploring technologies that can enhance safety and is in the early stages of actively exploring the potential for video analytics to aid verification of radar SVD alerts, with the ultimate aim of combining multiple data sources to detect stopped vehicles.
A National Highways spokesperson said: ‘We have a contract in place to actively explore how we can make further improvements to the verification of SVD alerts by using our existing CCTV coupled with video analytics.
‘This will add to our existing process for measuring SVD performance. The next step would be to explore how video analytics could be combined with existing, and any other emerging tools to supplement systems currently used by our control room operators to detect stopped vehicles.
The spokesperson said the technology being developed is a different project to the one referred to by ORR as ‘dormant’.
Any solution based on using CCTV will have to overcome the fact that CCTV on smart motorways does not cover the full carriageway at all times.
In November last year, National Highways said its preferred approach was the continued rollout of radar-based SVD, which it said ‘is the most effective solution’.
However, the ORR report the following month revealed that the existing technology was failing to meet performance requirements for detection rate, speed of detection or false positives. Highways subsequently revealed that no scheme on which SVD had been installed had met performance requirements.
