The market demand for in-vehicle video surveillance systems is strong, so why is it difficult to popularize them?

In recent years, transportation safety accidents have occurred frequently. Major accidents have occurred in passenger and freight vehicles, hazardous chemical transport vehicles, commercial vehicles, public transportation vehicles, etc. Tracing the causes, it is largely related to the drivers' weak safety awareness.

In March this year, a tanker caught fire on the Shenzhen Guangshen Expressway. When the traffic control department investigated the tanker's onboard monitoring system, it was found that the driver had been frequently playing with his mobile phone, listening to and replying to messages, eating melon seeds, smoking, and other abnormal driving behaviors before the accident. As a result, he failed to notice the slow-moving vehicle ahead in time and failed to avoid it in time, resulting in an accident.

On July 7 this year, a bus crashed into a lake in Anshun, Guizhou, which attracted nationwide attention. The driver drove slowly at first, then stepped on the accelerator, drove the vehicle full of passengers to the opposite lane, and then immediately rushed into the lake, causing many casualties on the bus. Afterwards, an investigation found that the accident was caused by the driver's subjective behavior.

After these two accidents, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Public Security and other departments have successively introduced a number of policies, such as improving the security system of public transportation, comprehensively using new and traditional technologies, warning and preventing safety risks, and vigorously promoting the development of on-board video surveillance products in the field of vehicle safety and operation supervision.

These measures were actually issued long before the two accidents occurred. So the question is, it has been more than 20 years since the birth of vehicle-mounted video surveillance products. How far have its technical level and solutions developed? Can it be developed from retrospective to pre-emptive prevention?

01 5G and AI enable vehicle monitoring, moving from “single recording” to “functional integration”

As a sub-industry of the video surveillance industry, vehicle-mounted video surveillance applies the video surveillance functions of fixed ground locations to mobile vehicles. It is an important application of video surveillance in the transportation field.

Compared with video surveillance in fixed places such as commercial, industrial, community, home and safe cities, vehicle-mounted video surveillance needs to maintain good image processing and intelligent analysis performance in complex vehicle working environments (such as high-speed vehicle movement, continuous vibration and impact, high and low temperatures, harsh power supplies, human damage, waterproof and fireproof, etc.), which places high technical requirements on the product.

On-board video surveillance mainly serves various commercial vehicles in on-board mobile scenarios, including buses, taxis, scheduled passenger buses, tourist chartered buses, hazardous chemical transport vehicles, slag removal vehicles, sanitation vehicles, school buses, police cars and freight vehicles.

Changes in market demand are driving the development of technology. Vehicle-mounted monitoring has evolved from basic recording functions to integrated GPS/BD positioning, integrated 3G/4G transmission, and now integrated AI artificial intelligence functions, which can analyze and warn of driving behavior.

Vehicle monitoring, from analog to digital, and then to high-definition network, the technical principles include network technology and image processing technology.

Targeted image acquisition of vehicle-mounted surveillance videos requires adaptive white balance technology, fast automatic exposure technology, and sensitive area encoding technology to enhance and improve the adaptability of images.

In addition, from traditional video surveillance to current intelligent video surveillance, artificial intelligence technology has played its unique role.

Through the learning and analysis of massive videos through artificial intelligence, the video surveillance system has transformed from "passive defense" to "active prevention", proactively discovering and alerting security risks in real time.

Ruiming Technology's solution takes proactive precautions through equipment deployment combined with system warnings. It uses road perception and driver behavior recognition technology to provide a variety of intelligent video monitoring functions, including driver status monitoring, safe driving assistance, blind spot detection, etc. It can identify and intervene in high-risk road conditions and driving behaviors, eliminate road safety hazards such as fatigue driving as much as possible, and significantly reduce the incidence of traffic accidents.

Alarm information and evidence will be reported in real time, so that the alarm has a basis. Through platform data analysis, actual management actions can be promoted to effectively prevent public transportation safety accidents.

Ruichiman, which also belongs to the field of vehicle-mounted monitoring, currently has product modules mainly including audio and video monitoring recording, Beidou GPS positioning, 3/4G audio and video transmission, alarm input and output, video passenger flow statistics function and active safety assisted driving function.

The active safety part includes ADAS function module - lane departure warning, front vehicle collision warning, pedestrian and non-motor vehicle identification warning; DSM function module - driver fatigue driving warning (yawning, closing eyes), phone call alarm, smoking alarm, driver distraction alarm, etc.; BSD function module - vehicle left and right side blind spot video analysis warning.

Through remote real-time preview monitoring, abnormal alarms (manual trigger or abnormal speed trigger) are uploaded in time, and AI technology is used to analyze the vehicle's driving status (abnormal lane deviation, collision with the vehicle in front) and the driver's driving behavior (smoking, talking on the phone, fatigue and drowsiness while driving, distraction and lack of concentration), and timely audio reminders and warnings are issued and alarm data is transmitted to the background to prevent accidents in advance.

Video analysis technology can also be used to determine whether there are pedestrians or non-motor vehicles in the vehicle's blind spot, and to promptly remind the driver to prevent blind spot accidents.

Therefore, the current in-vehicle surveillance video technology or solutions can not only record audio and video inside and outside the car, query the vehicle's location, transmit data and issue warnings to the monitoring center's backend, but also provide early warnings for dangerous driving behaviors to avoid accidents.

In addition, even after an accident, the video data will not be damaged. For example, the vehicle-mounted equipment of Ruiming Technology has certain vibration resistance, heat insulation and flame retardancy in terms of the structural design of the whole machine and storage.

Moreover, for extreme environments such as fire or falling into water, Ruiming Technology also has disaster recovery storage box related products to ensure data security.

It is understood that the disaster recovery storage box is a product similar to an airplane black box, which can synchronously back up the video data recorded by the host while in working condition. It has the characteristics of high temperature resistance (1100℃, 20min) and waterproof (100M water depth immersion). It can save the vehicle video data as completely as possible without loss in emergency situations such as vehicle burning and falling into water.

Ruichiman's current products can record and transmit the video inside the car. The monitoring center can preview and monitor the driver's condition and the situation inside the car in real time, and can issue early warnings for abnormal vehicle driving, such as abnormal lane departure, and provide timely reminders and data transmission to the background. The background can remotely cut off the fuel and power of the vehicle if abnormalities of the vehicle and driver are discovered in time, and record and preserve data throughout the process.

For the two accidents at the beginning of the article, if smart video surveillance had been installed in the car, the probability of accidents would have been much smaller. At the same time, there would have been technical support for subsequent accident tracing.

However, the reality is that most commercial vehicles, including passenger vehicles and hazardous materials vehicles, are not equipped with intelligent video surveillance, but only with surveillance equipment with ordinary video recording functions. There are still considerable challenges in the implementation of intelligent video surveillance.

02 The market demand is strong, so why is it difficult to popularize?

With the vigorous development of public transportation passenger and freight transport business, the number of vehicles in the transportation market has increased year by year, but the corresponding traffic safety management has not kept pace with the development of the situation. Traffic accidents occur frequently, especially the drivers' speeding, fatigue driving, two passengers and one dangerous goods driving violations are the main reasons for the frequent traffic accidents.

For this reason, the safety management of commercial vehicles during operation has received widespread attention from the public and high attention from regulatory authorities. The demand from regulatory authorities and operating companies to improve operational safety and management efficiency is growing.

As an effective means to assist in the safety supervision of commercial vehicles, the on-board monitoring system has a widely optimistic market prospect and is entering a period of stable growth.

At present, the global commercial vehicle on-board video surveillance market size is only about 12 billion yuan. Based on the global 300 million commercial vehicles, the average price of a single vehicle is 4,000 yuan, and the replacement cycle is 7-10 years. The global commercial vehicle on-board video surveillance stable natural replacement market size has reached about 120-170 billion yuan, and the industry is far from reaching its ceiling.