India Leverages NVIDIA's AI to Revolutionize Tollbooth Traffic Management

How India uses Nvidia accelerated computing to ease tollbooth traffic

Tne Indian road network is the second-largest in the world, and most of it is run manually. Traditional tollbooths, wherever in the world they're deployed, can contribute to massive traffic delays, long commute times and serious road congestion. To help automate tollbooths across India, Calsoft, an Indian-American technology company, helped implement a broad range of Nvidia technologies integrated with the country's dominant payment system, known as the unified payments interface, or UPI, for a client. Manual tollbooths demand more time and labor compared to automated ones. However, automating India's toll systems faces an extra complication: the diverse range of license plates. India's non-standardized plates pose a significant challenge to the accuracy of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. Any implementation would need to address these plate variations, which include divergent color, sizing, font styles and placement upon vehicles, as well as many different languages. The solution Calsoft helped build automatically reads passing vehicle plates and charges the associated driver's UPI account. This approach reduces the need for manual toll collection and is a massive step toward addressing traffic in the region. Automation in Action As part of a pilot program, this solution has been deployed in several leading metropolitan cities. The solution provides about 95% accuracy in its ability to read plates through the use of an ANPR pipeline that detects and classifies the plates as they roll through tollbooths. Nvidia's technology has been crucial in this effort, according to Vipin Shankar, senior vice president of technology at Calsoft. "Particularly challenging was night-time detection. Another challenge was model accuracy improvement on pixel distortions due to environmental impacts like fog, heavy rains, reflections due to bright sunshine, dusty winds and more," he said. The solution uses Nvidia Metropolis to track and detect vehicles throughout the process. Metropolis is an application framework, a set of developer tools and a partner ecosystem that brings visual data and AI together to improve operational efficiency and safety across a range of industries. Calsoft engineers used Nvidia Triton to deploy and manage their AI models. The team also used the Nvidia DeepStream software development kit to build a real-time streaming platform. This was key for processing and analyzing data streams efficiently, incorporating advanced capabilities such as real-time object detection and classification. Calsoft uses Nvidia hardware, including Nvidia Jetson edge AI modules and Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs in its AI solutions. Calsoft's tollbooth solution is also scalable, meaning it's designed to accommodate future growth and expansion needs, and can better ensure sustained performance and adaptability as traffic conditions evolve.

High-Tech Highways: India Uses NVIDIA Accelerated Computing to Ease Tollbooth Traffic

India is home to the globe's second-largest road network, spanning nearly 4 million miles, and has over a thousand tollbooths, most of them run manually. Traditional booths like these, wherever in the world they're deployed, can contribute to massive traffic delays, long commute times and serious road congestion. To help automate tollbooths across India, Calsoft, an Indian-American technology company, helped implement a broad range of NVIDIA technologies integrated with the country's dominant payment system, known as the unified payments interface, or UPI, for a client. Manual tollbooths demand more time and labor compared to automated ones. However, automating India's toll systems faces an extra complication: the diverse range of license plates. India's non-standardized plates pose a significant challenge to the accuracy of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. Any implementation would need to address these plate variations, which include divergent color, sizing, font styles and placement upon vehicles, as well as many different languages. The solution Calsoft helped build automatically reads passing vehicle plates and charges the associated driver's UPI account. This approach reduces the need for manual toll collection and is a massive step toward addressing traffic in the region. As part of a pilot program, this solution has been deployed in several leading metropolitan cities. The solution provides about 95% accuracy in its ability to read plates through the use of an ANPR pipeline that detects and classifies the plates as they roll through tollbooths. NVIDIA's technology has been crucial in this effort, according to Vipin Shankar, senior vice president of technology at Calsoft. "Particularly challenging was night-time detection," he said. "Another challenge was model accuracy improvement on pixel distortions due to environmental impacts like fog, heavy rains, reflections due to bright sunshine, dusty winds and more." The solution uses NVIDIA Metropolis to track and detect vehicles throughout the process. Metropolis is an application framework, a set of developer tools and a partner ecosystem that brings visual data and AI together to improve operational efficiency and safety across a range of industries. Calsoft engineers used NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software to deploy and manage their AI models. The team also used the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit to build a real-time streaming platform. This was key for processing and analyzing data streams efficiently, incorporating advanced capabilities such as real-time object detection and classification. Calsoft uses NVIDIA hardware, including NVIDIA Jetson edge AI modules and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in its AI solutions. Calsoft's tollbooth solution is also scalable, meaning it's designed to accommodate future growth and expansion needs, and can better ensure sustained performance and adaptability as traffic conditions evolve.

Calsoft and NVIDIA Bring Vision AI to Solve India's Tollbooth Traffic

The solution, currently being piloted in several major Indian cities, boasts a 95% accuracy rate in reading plates. In partnership with NVIDIA, Indian-American tech company Calsoft is automating tollbooths across India using advanced vision AI. With the world's second-largest road network spanning nearly 4 million miles and over 1,000 tollbooths, many of which operate manually and contribute to traffic delays and congestion, this new solution aims to significantly ease the problem. Calsoft's innovative solution integrates NVIDIA's technologies with India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system to streamline toll collection. One of the primary challenges in automating India's tollbooths is the country's non-standardised vehicle license plates, which vary in color, size, font, and language. These variations posed a significant obstacle to the accuracy of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems. Despite these challenges, Calsoft has developed a system that reads vehicle plates automatically and charges the associated UPI account, reducing the need for manual toll collection. This approach represents a major advancement in managing highway traffic. The solution, currently being piloted in several major Indian cities, boasts a 95% accuracy rate in reading plates. This achievement is largely due to the ANPR pipeline, which detects and classifies license plates as vehicles pass through tollbooths. NVIDIA's technology has played a critical role in overcoming obstacles such as night-time detection and environmental impacts like fog, heavy rain, and bright sunlight, which can distort plate recognition. Vipin Shankar, Calsoft's Senior Vice President of Technology, emphasised the challenges faced and how NVIDIA Metropolis, an AI application framework, was essential in enhancing the system's operational efficiency. ""Particularly challenging was night-time detection. Another challenge was model accuracy improvement on pixel distortions due to environmental impacts like fog, heavy rains, reflections due to bright sunshine, dusty winds and more," he said. Calsoft also employed NVIDIA Triton to deploy and manage their AI models and utilised the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK to build a real-time streaming platform capable of advanced object detection and classification. Calsoft's tollbooth automation solution, powered by NVIDIA Jetson edge AI modules and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, is designed to be scalable, ensuring it can accommodate future growth and evolving traffic conditions. This development marks a significant step forward in India's efforts to ease road congestion and improve the efficiency of its highway network. Interestingly, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari recently said that the country will move towards a new form of satellite-based toll collection system, where money will be charged from one's bank account and the amount of road covered will be charged accordingly. This step will help towards saving time and money.