Listen to this articleEstablished in 2018 and winner of the Product Innovation Award at Gulf Traffic 2018, Hazen.ai is leading the development of AI-powered road safety solutions. Its solutions are powered by proprietary custom computer vision technology providing traffic intelligence through real-time monitoring, trends, and predictive analytics. Below is our recent interview with Sohaib Khan, CEO and Co-founder at Hazen.ai:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Hazen.ai?
A: Hazen.ai has created the first edge-based system to provide real-time analysis and enforcement of many different violations, providing the most accuracy in detecting and understanding vehicle behavior on the road. Hazen.ai traffic analytics suite is the first and only to detect different types of dangerous driving behavior on the fly from a normal CCTV camera, making traffic enforcement quicker, cheaper, simpler, and more effective.
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Q: Can you provide insights into the challenges of current traffic enforcement methods and why they need to be changed?
A: Current traffic solutions haven’t changed since the ’90s. Traffic enforcement still uses radar and lidar technology that is expensive to install and doesn’t have the range and capability that artificial intelligence solutions have presented in only the past couple of years. Looking at statistics of road safety, you’ll also see that the situation hasn’t changed much in the last two decades, meaning it hasn’t gotten worse, but also hasn’t improved. Road traffic fatalities are estimated at 1.35 million each year. That is more than 150 deaths every hour! Our mission is to reduce these fatalities as much as possible by using technology to make roads safer and educate drivers.
Q: What is novel about how Hazen.ai leverages computer vision to create traffic solutions?
A: Our unique technology has the ability to monitor traffic at the edge, meaning that we only use information that will allow us to identify violations and then destroy all irrelevant data. This provides added privacy to our process. With computer vision we are able to handle high occlusion between vehicles, meaning that we can identify violations in wide angles or areas where it is difficult to see. This is particularly important for our customers because it makes it easy for them to install new cameras on any road-side pole, or to covert existing CCTV cameras into sophisticated traffic sensors. We provide image-based detection of seat-belt compliance and texting while driving, two major safety issues on the roads today. Moreover, our software can detect other types of dangerous and unsafe behavior on the road, like not stopping at a stop sign, tail-gating, dangerous lane changes, and incorrect lane usage.
Q: What is the impact the technology will make on the industry?
A: The industry has needed innovation for a while. The great thing about our technology is that it can be installed on existing infrastructure if desired, reducing the cost and the need for added hardware or construction at any given site. We hope this will provide additional resources to ensure road safety and make intelligent decisions around city planning as well. This is particularly important for developing countries, where the adoption of traffic radars has been limited, mainly due to their high cost and complicated installation. We want to lower that bar and make this essential safety equipment affordable and simpler to deploy and operate so that our commutes become safer for all road users.
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Q: What’s the best thing about Hazen.ai that people might not know about?
A: We have been under the radar, so there may be many things people don’t know about Hazen.ai. I think most importantly how we are coming together to apply technology to ensure road safety through computer vision is the most critical. We already have deployments of our technology all over the world and they are increasing month by month with our various services including our traffic violations monitor, traffic spot and turn counter, and our latest release of mobile phone and seatbelt detection. With these, we are well on our way to supporting the Road to Zero, the mission of reducing road fatalities to zero by 2050.
