BENGALURU: The Artificial Intelligence for Integrated Mobility at the Indian Institute of Science (AIM@IISc) on Friday released the Urban Vision Hackathon (UVH-26) datasets and models for Indian urban traffic with the aim to improve it.
The large-scale traffic image datasets comprise 26,646 high-resolution traffic images from Bengaluru’s Safe City project. The information includes vehicular details that has been curated through the hackathon by engaging over 560 student volunteers under a crowdsourced annotation effort. The information underscores the importance of contextually aligned data for improving the transportation system.
“India has always been data-poor for AI applications, especially in mobility, given the scale and complexity of Indian traffic. UVH-26 is a testament to how crowdsourced efforts by hundreds of engaged students can create high-quality datasets that rival global benchmarks. This shows the power of community-driven AI for solving local challenges,” said Yogesh Simmhan, Associate Professor at Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), IISc.
The UVH-26 initiative was done by the Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), CDS, Bengaluru City Police and Bengaluru Traffic Police .
“We often talk about evidence-based decision support for our cities, but it really starts with good data – something we still struggle with because collecting it is expensive and time-consuming. Accurate traffic detection models can change that by using existing city cameras to generate reliable data for planning, signal control, congestion management, and safety analytics. UVH-26 can help all Indian cities, not just Bengaluru, build such datasets and enable data-driven solutions,” said Vijay Kovvali, Research Professor at CiSTUP, IISc.