NVIDIA Accelerated Computing to Ease India’s tollbooth traffic

India is home to the globe’s second-largest road network, spanning nearly 4 million miles, with over a thousand toll booths. To help automate these toll booths across India, Calsoft is helping to implement a broad range of NVIDIA technologies integrated with the country’s dominant payment system, the unified payments interface (UPI), for a client.

As part of a pilot program, this solution has been deployed in several leading metropolitan cities.

The manual tollbooths require more time and labour in comparison to automated ones. However, automating India’s toll systems faces an extra complication: the diverse range of license plates.

India’s non-standardized plates pose a significant challenge to the accuracy of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. Any implementation would need to address these plate variations, which include divergent color, sizing, font styles and placement upon vehicles, as well as many different languages.

 Calsoft developed a solution that automatically reads vehicle license plates as they pass and charges the driver’s UPI account. This move helped reduce the necessity for manual toll collection and also helped to address traffic in the region.

The solution provides about 95% accuracy in its ability to read plates through the use of an ANPR pipeline that detects and classifies the plates as they roll through tollbooths.

As per Vipin Shankar, Senior Vice President of Technology at Calsoft, NVIDIA’s technology is important in this effort. “Particularly challenging was night-time detection,” he said. “Another challenge was model accuracy improvement on pixel distortions due to environmental impacts like fog, heavy rains, reflections due to bright sunshine, dusty winds and more.”

The solution uses NVIDIA Metropolis to track and detect vehicles throughout the process. Metropolis is an application framework, a set of developer tools and a partner ecosystem that brings visual data and AI together to improve operational efficiency and safety across a range of industries.

To deploy and manage AI models, Calsoft engineers used NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software. They also used the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit to build a real-time streaming platform. This was crucial for efficiently processing and analyzing data streams, integrating advanced features like real-time object detection and classification.   

Calsoft uses NVIDIA hardware, including NVIDIA Jetson edge AI modules and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in its AI solutions. Calsoft’s tollbooth solution is also scalable, meaning it’s designed to accommodate future growth and expansion needs, and can better ensure sustained performance and adaptability as traffic conditions evolve.