Cape Town To Deploy Lidar-Based Fiber Vehicle Detection Systems

Silicon Valley-based Cepton, a smart lidar solution provider, and Fibre Based Integrations, a fiber optics systems company, are partnering to develop lidar-based vehicle detection solutions in Cape Town, South Africa. Fiber will deploy vehicle classification systems on traffic lights at intersections and overhead devices that utilize Cepton’s Helius Smart Lidar System with Vista-P Lidar sensors.

The lidar-enabled systems will gather highly accurate, real-time lane usage data to help identify ways to improve traffic flow and safety for drivers and pedestrians. The data gathered will include such information as: vehicle size; traffic volume and frequency; lane positioning; and potential obstructions. This will allow system operators to better understand how a specific intersection or roadway is being used, including: unauthorized vehicle types in designated bus lanes, peak traffic time windows, real-time lane occupancy status, wait time at traffic lights and accident-prone areas.

“The reason we chose to deploy lidars in our vehicle detection and classification systems is their superior accuracy. We have previously tested radars and some other types of sensors, and we found that they lack the resolution needed to accurately locate and count vehicles and provide accurate 3D information about their sizes and speeds,” said Josh Goosen, System Engineer at Fibre Based Integrations . “We found Cepton lidars to be the best performing and most accurate compared with others we tested, and this has unlocked new possibilities for implementing our smart city solutions with the City of Cape Town.”

Future plans may include using Cepton’s Lidars to augment the city’s analogue and video systems with an additional layer of functionality and performance. The aim will be to blend human and vehicle classification with an artificial intelligence platform to understand how both interact with the city environment.