The Sales Director, Africa, Western Digital, Ghassan Azzi, has advised emerging cities in Africa to adopt the use of AI-analysed traffic patterns to adjust traffic lights, improve vehicle flow and reduce congestion.

Azzi in a statement said AI-analysed traffic patterns will increase pedestrian safety. He said providing data, and smart technologies can enable the devices to deploy intelligent insights on traffic flow.

He said: “Whilst technological breakthroughs and the adoption of digital technologies have brought a new era of progress, it can sometimes be hard for the untrained eye to recognise cutting-edge innovations in everyday life.

“However, smart cities are a key field where new technologies, such as smart video, directly and visibly, raise living standards.

“Smart cities use information and communication technologies to improve operational efficiency, share information with the public and provide a better quality of local authority services.

“For example, advancements in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have enabled connected public transportation systems, which leverage real-time monitoring capabilities, as well as tracking the locations and routes of public vehicles.

“Not only does this speed up service times and reduce traffic congestion, it also cuts waiting times for passengers and keeps them informed. There’s also an important security element to smart cities.

“Smart video or cameras utilise artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and deep learning (DL) to analyse visual data in real time and can dispatch orders from a hub to AI-powered devices faster than a human can process.

“On a larger scale, real-time video analysis is also capable of identifying and differentiating between objects, for example distinguishing humans from animals, and alerting the relevant people or systems if they are in a prohibited location or place.

“The development of higher video resolutions, such as 4K, is key here, enabling CCTV cameras to capture more data in high quality and from various angles, making analysis easier and empowering the smart video future.

“The smart video sector is going through a transitional phase for recording video at scale: it has moved away from recording raw data from a standard camera to carrying out analysis on the AI-enabled camera itself.”

According to Azzi, storage is critical to the evolution and efficient working of smart video systems. He said smart video architectures require innovative storage technologies, which deliver needed flexibility, performance, capacity and reliability.

“Robust on-board storage must be specially designed to meet the needs arising from multi-streaming devices, on-device deep learning systems and AI-training solutions.

“Storage solutions, like Western Digital’s WD PurpleTM Pro line, have evolved to provide high data transfer and write speeds, as well as the capacity to ensure world-class video capture.

“Western Digital has a strong history of innovation, going back to the origins of both hard disk drive technology and flash technology.

“The company works closely with market and innovation leaders in smart video to develop a deep understanding of today’s and tomorrow’s advances in AI-enabled architectures.

“WD Purple Pro is engineered with advanced capabilities needed for high-end smart video solutions, including cameras, NVRs (network video recorders), and back-end video analytics servers. It is purpose-built for 24×7 operating environments and rated for high endurance and demanding AI workloads,” he said.