I have several older posts about Miovision and their automated counting system. We were an early customer of there's, but after becoming frustrated with their pricing model we ended up developing our own hybrid video/manual counting system which we sell at CountingCars.com. Our system is far less expensive to own and operate.
Many people over the years have asked me how Miovision's system works. The guys from Miovision are pretty coy if you ask them – I've never gotten a straight answer beyond its complicated machine vision technology. A lot of people have insinuated that they have a huge system that beams video to a third world country where the counts are done manually from video. This would be feasible and profitable given Miovision's pricing structure.
I'm not in this camp. I think they actually have machine vision doing some of the work. But I also think their system needs human intervention to make sure it's working correctly – it's probably not 100% automated.
A skeptical friend of mine has done some digging and he came across Miovision's technology patent, which you can look at here. Here's the text from the patent description that leads me to think its a hybrid machine vision/human quality assurance system -
From page 11:
It has
been recognized that since the video analysis 42 may not be perfect and for some
algorithms and/or types of video content, the results may not be reliable
enough to ensure consistency. To mitigate such unreliability and to offer an improved
quality of service, the post processing stage
50 is included at the server side. The post processing stage 50 may
conceptually be considered a quality assurance
(QA) stage that is performed in order to review the extracted data so as
to verify the integrity of the extracted data with respect to what actually
occurred in the video file 24, correct any errors that are found and, in
general, ensure that the analysis is satisfactory. The post processing stage 50
allows the server side to separate duties amongst several server devices. The post processing stage 50 is typically performed
in an automatic or partially automatic fashion but may also be performed manually by a human operator.
