In the near future, traffic cameras in Russia could track vehicles carrying dangerous goods and identify individuals on wanted lists. This was shared with socialbites.ca by Sergey Laskin, the general director of the Astralab company, which develops software for traffic police and TsODD cameras.
“Looking at the European market, there will be demand for tracking dangerous goods vehicles in Russia. Laskin noted that cars carrying the “dangerous goods” sign can be driven far from many locations and cannot always be used, such as fuel trucks and other heavy vehicles.
According to sources, camera development will also move toward facial recognition. Yet implementing this will be challenging, since no institution maintains a comprehensive biometric database with tens of millions of drivers.
“I think cameras will soon identify wanted citizens. Today there are technologies that can improve image quality by photographing the car from the front. On our cameras, faces are already highly recognizable. A face recognition module could be added to the equipment,” he stated.
This wouldn’t be done by the camera alone, which can highlight faces in the image, but by a neural network that sends data to a server to cross-check against databases of debtors, criminals, missing persons, and others, the interlocutor explained.
“I believe this will inevitably appear in the next two or three years,” Laskin added.
A former developer of traffic police cameras noted that modern cameras already automatically detect traffic violations and that some hidden features remain unused in Russia for now.