Monitoring in Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans: The CPH: Sense approach

Monitoring and information collection are important tools in the development and implementation of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) that serve the purpose of timely identification of problems, evaluation, decisions and actions towards better urban mobility. By providing valid and important information to decision makers and stakeholders, SUMPs have or will make a positive contribution to the environmental, social and economic sustainability of a community.
In this context, CPH:Sense suggests a multimodal and distributed approach to get information about the street space use. Computer Vision and other sensor-based non-intrusive techniques will be employed to understand and characterize the street space, featuring state-of-the-art recognition techniques in order to get the semantics out of the scene. To that end, we developed a micro capsule based on a single board computer aiming at improving the capturing, the processing and the visualization of traffic data trough a black-box / local processing oriented approach: this approach permits to stream highly processed forms of information, avoiding the unwanted stream of images and bypassing then any possible privacy issue; this also leads to the possibility of saving historical data and to keep the global infrastructure very light, cheap and agile to scale. The CPH:Sense is based on an Open Hardware and Open Data approach, which makes possible to imagine and create further development both of the sensors and the software in every moment.