Vizzion, already the provider of the world’s largest network of traffic cameras, is announcing a new platform that will give access to on-vehicle cameras — producing live imagery as they travel. On a never before seen scale, imagery is collected on the fly from a network of tens of thousands of cellular-connected on-vehicle cameras, thanks to Vizzion’s exclusive partnership with one of the world’s largest commercial-vehicle telematics camera suppliers. Vizzion expects additional partnerships which will ultimately expand the network into the hundreds of thousands of vehicles. By collecting imagery from key road locations or ‘hot spots’ worldwide, the new system will considerably broaden Vizzion’s coverage and add significant density to existing areas.

Benefiting Existing and Future Applications

Vizzion’s massive new network of live imagery can generate wide-ranging, high density webs of hyperlocal traffic, weather, and other data which can be simply and seamlessly integrated into existing applications and services through Vizzion’s XML Web Service. The network will provide a new platform for application developers, government road agencies, and other organizations to connect with leading camera imagery suppliers; enabling them to extract valuable road condition, road incident, and atmospheric information. “Whether for use-cases such as mapping, news reporting, road management, or public safety,” explains Keith Anderson, Vizzion’s Marketing Manager, “this new platform can save operators from expensive on-the-ground crews and other alternatives by providing live views of current conditions with unprecedented road coverage.”

Vizzion plans to use this vast resource of new data to enhance its own services such as the Desktop Video Wall and Poor Visibility Detection Service, as well as future analytics projects. With this large pool of new data, Vizzion anticipates both new innovations of its own and from 3rd party application developers. As Chris Cooper, Vizzion’s President elaborates, “We see tremendous added value for existing applications, but we also anticipate a whole new class of applications evolving around this new paradigm of dense and ubiquitous real-time road imagery.”

Continuing Vizzion’s Commitment to Quality

This new system continues Vizzion’s uncompromising commitment to provide the best of breed traffic camera services by supporting the exponential expansion of Vizzion’s traffic camera network—growing by about 30% each year — while maintaining the high quality of its service. “The launch of our first on-vehicle network of cameras is a significant milestone for Vizzion,” Cooper explains, “It has certainly been our most challenging project to date — work began on this concept over 10 years ago and we’ve had to overcome numerous technical and other obstacles along the way to deliver a quality product.”

One such obstacle was ensuring that the new service does not infringe on anyone’s privacy; all imagery is anonymized and collected from public roads only and no personally identifiable information, such as faces or license plates, is produced.

The addition of real-time street-level imagery from on-vehicle cameras to Vizzion’s already robust network, integrated seamlessly into Vizzion’s XML Web Service to allow for quick and easy implementation by application developers, will be a boon for any developers involved in traffic management, weather reporting, incident investigation, public safety, or other fields.

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