Over the last few months we’ve let you know that we were developing and testing the night count feature of the Telraam S2 device. We’re now happy to let you know that we’ve remotely installed this on active S2 devices all across the world.
What is it?
Night counts are a new ‘class’ of data in the app and dashboard that gives you a total count of vehicles on your street during the darker hours when the S2 device is otherwise unable to count normally.
The S2 counts objects using the camera, and so needs enough light to recognise each one. However, when it is dark, although we cannot see the outlines of objects to tell whether it is a car, truck or bus, we can still count the vehicles using the vehicle lights themselves and then group these together.
This means that the count is a cumulative number of all vehicles. Instead of adding this to the existing categories (cars, trucks, etc.) it is separated out as ‘night’ data, and is displayed as a black bar on your daily counts.
There will be no counts of pedestrians or cyclists at night.
Where can I see the night data?
To see the night data on any segment, simply click on a device on our homepage map and (if this is an S2 device), you’ll see the additional night data for the overnight hours, like this:
You can also see this data for your own device on your dashboard.
What if I have a V1 device?
The new algorithm update only applies to the S2 devices.
I have an S2 but I can’t see my night data
The remote updates of your device firmware have been running over the last week or so. We have updated almost all devices but if yours was not connected or had low signal quality, this may not yet have completed. Please be patient, but if it does not appear in the next week or so, please get in touch via support and we may be able to give you further information.
I’m not sure about that result. We do count “lights” but generally speaking any lights on bicycles are usually below the threshold of being visible and not counted.
I will share this with the team and we may want to get some video to do some testing and review if that was possible?
I recently installed a Telraam S2 and noticed that the “night mode” is substantially undercounting vehicles. Previous manual count data shows that the traffic here stays steady until about 7-8PM. But I see a very steep dropoff in counts with the S2 once the night mode begins. Is there anything I can do to improve the perfomance?
I’m not sure. It is hard to say because we would really need to have a more direct comparison of a manual count and the device data to be sure that this was still the case.
In terms of improving the quality of data, the best option is to make sure you have the right ROI set (which I think you may have edited recently) and also that the angle of the device is as good as possible (ie. not too high or low to ensure a clear view of the street).
One thing you could try is to run a manual validation using these instructions and so we can get some idea of what the discrepancy might be.
Interesting - looking over the manual validation protocol it seems that you will apply a “multiplier” (e.g 1.3 * S2 counts) to the web counts? My device is at the edge of the recommended distance to the street. I will probably try moving the S2 to a neighbor with a better positioned window before I try that.
