Artificial intelligence (AI) is all over the place today. While that’s an exciting prospect to some, it’s an uncomfortable thought for others. Applications like AI-powered traffic cameras are particularly controversial. As their name suggests, they analyze footage of vehicles on the road with machine vision.
They’re typically a law enforcement measure — police may use them to catch distracted drivers or other violations, like a automobile with no passengers using a carpool lane. Nonetheless, they may simply monitor traffic patterns to tell broader smart city operations. In all cases, though, they raise possibilities and questions on ethics in equal measure.
How Common Are AI Traffic Cameras Today?
While the thought of an AI-powered traffic camera remains to be relatively recent, they’re already in use in several places. Nearly half of U.K. police forces have implemented them to implement seatbelt and texting-while-driving regulations. U.S. law enforcement is beginning to follow suit, with North Carolina catching nine times as many phone violations after installing AI cameras.
Fixed cameras aren’t the one use case in motion today, either. Some transportation departments have begun experimenting with machine vision systems inside public vehicles like buses. At the least 4 cities within the U.S. have implemented such an answer to detect cars illegally parked in bus lanes.
With so many local governments using this technology, it’s secure to say it should likely grow in the long run. Machine learning will grow to be increasingly reliable over time, and early tests could lead on to further adoption in the event that they show meaningful improvements.
Rising smart city investments could also drive further expansion. Governments across the globe are betting hard on this technology. China goals to construct 500 smart cities, and India plans to check these technologies in no less than 100 cities. As that happens, more drivers may encounter AI cameras on their day by day commutes.
Advantages of Using AI in Traffic Cameras
AI traffic cameras are growing for a reason. The innovation offers a couple of critical benefits for public agencies and personal residents.
Safety Improvements
Essentially the most obvious upside to those cameras is they will make roads safer. Distracted driving is dangerous — it led to the deaths of 3,308 people in 2022 alone — however it’s hard to catch. Algorithms can recognize drivers on their phones more easily than highway patrol officers can, helping implement laws prohibiting these reckless behaviors.
Early signs are promising. The U.K. and U.S. police forces which have began using such cameras have seen massive upticks in tickets given to distracted drivers or those not wearing seatbelts. As law enforcement cracks down on such actions, it’ll incentivize people to drive safer to avoid the penalties.
AI may work faster than other methods, like red light cameras. Since it automates the evaluation and ticketing process, it avoids lengthy manual workflows. Because of this, the penalty arrives soon after the violation, which makes it a simpler deterrent than a delayed response. Automation also means areas with smaller police forces can still enjoy such advantages.
Streamlined Traffic
AI-powered traffic cameras can minimize congestion on busy roads. The areas using them to catch illegally parked cars are a main example. Enforcing bus lane regulations ensures public vehicles can stop where they need to, avoiding delays or disruptions to traffic in other lanes.
Automating tickets for seatbelt and distracted driving violations has an analogous effect. Pulling someone over can disrupt other cars on the road, especially in a busy area. By taking an image of license plates and sending the driving force a bill as a substitute, police departments can ensure safer streets without adding to the chaos of on a regular basis traffic.
Non-law-enforcement cameras could take this advantage further. Machine vision systems throughout a city could recognize congestion and update map services accordingly, rerouting people around busy areas to forestall lengthy delays. Considering how the common U.S. driver spent 42 hours in traffic in 2023, any such improvement is a welcome change.
Downsides of AI Traffic Monitoring
While the advantages of AI traffic cameras are value noting, they’re not an ideal solution. The technology also carries some substantial potential downsides.
False Positives and Errors
The correctness of AI may raise some concerns. While it tends to be more accurate than people in repetitive, data-heavy tasks, it may well still make mistakes. Consequently, removing human oversight from the equation could lead on to innocent people receiving fines.
A software bug could cause machine vision algorithms to misidentify images. Cybercriminals could make such instances more likely through data poisoning attacks. While people could likely dispute their tickets and clear their name, it will take a protracted, difficult process to accomplish that, counteracting a number of the technology’s efficiency advantages.
False positives are a related concern. Algorithms can produce high false positive rates, resulting in more charges against innocent people, which carries racial implications in lots of contexts. Because data biases can remain hidden until it’s too late, AI in government applications can exacerbate problems with racial or gender discrimination within the legal system.
Privacy Issues
The largest controversy around AI-powered traffic cameras is a well-recognized one — privacy. As more cities install these systems, they record pictures of a bigger variety of drivers. A lot data in a single place raises big questions on surveillance and the safety of sensitive details like license plate numbers and drivers’ faces.
Many AI camera solutions don’t save images unless they determine it’s an instance of a violation. Even so, their operation would mean the solutions could store lots of — if not hundreds — of images of individuals on the road. Concerns about government surveillance aside, all that information is a tempting goal for cybercriminals.
U.S. government agencies suffered 32,211 cybersecurity incidents in 2023 alone. Cybercriminals are already targeting public organizations and demanding infrastructure, so it’s comprehensible why some people could also be concerned that such groups would gather much more data on residents. A knowledge breach in a single AI camera system could affect many who wouldn’t have otherwise consented to giving freely their data.
What the Future Could Hold
Given the controversy, it might take some time for automated traffic cameras to grow to be a world standard. Stories of false positives and concerns over cybersecurity issues may delay some projects. Ultimately, though, that’s a great thing — attention to those challenges will result in crucial development and regulation to make sure the rollout does more good than harm.
Strict data access policies and cybersecurity monitoring can be crucial to justify widespread adoption. Similarly, government organizations using these tools should confirm the event of their machine-learning models to envision for and stop problems like bias. Regulations just like the recent EU Artificial Intelligence Act have already provided a legislative precedent for such qualifications.
AI Traffic Cameras Bring Each Promise and Controversy
AI-powered traffic cameras should still be recent, but they deserve attention. Each the guarantees and pitfalls of the technology need greater attention as more governments seek to implement them. Higher awareness of the chances and challenges surrounding this innovation can foster safer development for a secure and efficient road network in the long run.
