PoliceMap System

Urban and extra-urban mobility, today times characteristics, has a great influence on citizens’ life quality. That means a growing need of road system service improvement, of better infrastructures and, above all, faster and more effective interventions, in case of very critical situations, such as those following traffic accidents. PoliceMap systems was born from a partnership between Autostrade per l’Italia and Polizia Stradale to build a tool that allows to speed up at most measurement operations of traffic incident, aiming to free as soon as possible the road, and so, minimizing possible queues. The main goal is, however, to improve the safety level of the highway network. Getronics and MenciSoftware technical, commercial and scientific partnership produced the idea and the development of the project. Getronics has a long-time experience in Italy through development of innovative solutions for territory control market sector. MenciSoftware has created and developed the software product hereafter described and has worked for many years in technological research on measurement through images. The integrated measurement system allows a metric survey relating to the accident area by taking digital pictures of the accident scene, without measurement needed, and following geometric representation of scene as back office activity. The main purpose is to simplify at most photographic and planimetric measurement activities of Road Police, reducing significatively the necessary time to these activities compared to traditional method, reducing problems for road users and increasing road safety standards. PoliceMap is an open system so, as well as the above described advantages, it can be integrated with other systems working in safety road fields. Data produced can be shared, for example, with other software programs that compute statistics reports about dynamics and most frequent causes which cause some kinds of accident.

Solution characteristics

System consisting of:

* A metric survey kit in equipment to Polizia Stradale staff that working on accident scene: a Digital photocamera (6 MegaPixel at least) with fixed lens, a Reference Metric outline (calibrated metric reference), a Reference bar

* PC workstations with:  Windows O.S., PoliceMap software, A3 format plotter or color printer

System Properties

System main properties are:

* Speed and ease of use

* Measurement accuracy

* Certified by Italian Authority for Calibration

* Data security (pictures and alphanumeric data)

* Repeatability of results.

Quickness and easiness use are obtained by reducing to its lowest terms operations on the accident scene. In fact, only few photo shots, containing accident details and the appropriate metric outline are sufficient. Computing software is studied to facilitate data and measures collection. The use of metaphor of graphics representation (pop-up, menus, etc…) typical of Windows environment and generally known to users, contributes to speed up the tasks. Measurements high precision is due to high quality lenses, that produce high number of pixels pictures, and to high scientific level sophisticated computing algorithm adoption. Such a precision is guarantee by SIT certification (Servizio di Taratura in Italia), which is the official authority, part of CNR (Italian National Research Center), in charge of calibrating measurement tools. SIT is officially recognized at European level. Data security is obtained thru digital photo-camera able to memorize on un-rewritable mini-CD, as a traditional analogical film. Data inalterability is guarantee, moreover, by non-standard format picture memorization, so it is impossible to modify them, without using this system’s proper tools.

Further advantage of this innovative technology is the possibility to get once more the same measurements if necessary and integrate them with others, initially considered not necessary. Such kind of feature is impossible, instead, with traditional manual measurement method.