[HN Gopher] Practical machine learning to estimate traffic flow ...
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       Practical machine learning to estimate traffic flow in San Juan,
       Puerto Rico
        
       Author : boredumb
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2021-11-17 22:10 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (santurcesoftware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (santurcesoftware.com)
        
       | alexpotato wrote:
       | Despite having worked in technology based jobs for 20 years and
       | been involved with computers for almost 30, it still boggles my
       | mind that we've reached a point where we can:
       | 
       | - connect to publicly available video streams - over public
       | internet - run existing computer vision libraries - to identify
       | real objects correctly
       | 
       | and all for free!
       | 
       | It really is astounding.
       | 
       | Not sure if some of this comes from working in old school FinTech
       | where code is old, monkey patched etc or just my age. I will say
       | that this is the kind of HN that keeps me inspired that tech will
       | just keep getting easier and easier to use which will in turn
       | lead to cooler and cooler projects.
        
       | pilotneko wrote:
       | In short, the author used yolo5 to count cars from webcam streams
       | locations along highways in San Juan. I think it would have been
       | easier to do background subtraction and count vehicles using
       | standard vision techniques (e.g., threshold, watershed, count
       | blobs), given that they had access to a fixed view security feed.
        
         | boredumb wrote:
         | Counting the different vehicles to boot strap it and have it
         | start saving training images into the categories so that a new
         | model could be trained against those images, and not rely on
         | object detection to create new training data or power that app.
        
         | edge17 wrote:
         | I think the author used Yolov5 to _detect_ cars and their own
         | method for counting them. Counting requires tracking object
         | instances, which Yolo doesn 't do.
        
           | jjwiseman wrote:
           | He rant it every 60 seconds, so I don't think he was too
           | concerned about tracking instances. And it doesn't really
           | matter for purposes of classifying traffic levels.
        
         | alexpotato wrote:
         | For the night images, I would imagine just number of red pixels
         | would give a roughly accurate count which could be converted
         | into "high" or "low"
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-19 23:02 UTC)