Artificial intelligence solutions provider SenSen Networks Ltd recently announced the launch of the world’s first AI-powered smartphone app Gemineye, which offers governments, municipalities and cities worldwide a way to help tackle illegal dumping.
Illegal dumping is a significant issue for local governments, municipalities, cities and our planet. Not only is illegal dumping a threat to the environment, contaminating soil and nearby waterways, but it is also a public health issue and can cost taxpayers millions to prevent, monitor, enforce and clean up. The challenge is that catching dodgy dumpers requires a significant level of investment in time and resources.
According to SenSen, in America, illegal dumping costs municipalities and taxpayers millions of dollars a year. For example, in Pennsylvania, it costs taxpayers upward of $10 million per year to clean up roadside litter and $600 per ton to clean up an illegal dump site, of which there are thousands in Pennsylvania.
SenSen claims this is a cost-effective approach to smart city management and removing the barriers to entry.With the technology accessible through a smartphone app, governments and municipalities can significantly reduce capital expenditure and the maintenance costs of expensive smart city infrastructure and analysis solutions, such as illegal dumping monitoring equipment. The company says labor costs can also be reduced, as the AI technology can notify authorities when a certain situation arises, rather than having to review all the footage manually to identify incidents of interest.
How it Works
Municipalities or government operators select the service they require through the Gemineye smartphone app. The smartphone will then begin to analyze feeds from its sensors and cameras in real-time, utilizing SenSen’s proprietary AI-powered software. SenSen’s software will then identify activities of people, vehicles of interest and assets of relevance to the city and upload this data to their smart city cloud infrastructure in real-time.
Current approaches use a combination of wildlife photography devices and CCTV cameras to capture activity on illegal dumping. This is expensive, not real time, immobile and requires significant manual effort to go through all motion activated imagery to identify people and vehicles of interest.
With the new app, SenSen says not only do municipalities get notified in real-time when someone is conducting illegal activity, but it also captures all the information they require to properly enforce compliance with local laws, as well as being highly portable.
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