Skip to main content

Traficon incident detection technology deployed in Dartford tunnel

Traficon has been awarded a contract to provide 70 VIP-IP video image processing boards for installation in the Dartford tunnel on London’s M25 orbital motorway. The technology will be installed in collaboration with Vital Technology Ltd, and will provide extensive automatic incident detection (AID) capabilities, including the detection of stopped vehicles and smoke detection. The Dartford - Thurrock river crossing is one of Europe's most heavily used crossings and complex traffic management systems. An ave
June 26, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
5574 Traficon has been awarded a contract to provide 70 VIP-IP video image processing boards for installation in the Dartford tunnel on London’s M25 orbital motorway. The technology will be installed in collaboration with 6028 Vital Technology Ltd, and will provide extensive automatic incident detection (AID) capabilities, including the detection of stopped vehicles and smoke detection.

The Dartford - Thurrock river crossing is one of Europe's most heavily used crossings and complex traffic management systems. An average of 140,000 vehicles a week pass through the crossing, which comprises two dual-lane tunnels carrying traffic to the north and a four-lane cable-stayed bridge carrying traffic to the south.

“This award demonstrates Traficon’s strong market position in video based automatic incident detection systems and our client’s confidence in our solutions,” said Sukhdev Bhogal, business development director at Traficon. “By detecting incidents fast, secondary accidents can be avoided and traffic congestion reduced dramatically.”

The Traficon VIP-IP is a multi-functional video image processor for traffic control using network cameras. It integrates automatic incident detection, data collection, vehicle presence detection, digital recording of pre and post-incident video sequences and streaming video in one board for a variety of traffic management applications such as tunnels, highways and bridges. The board makes use of field-proven Traficon algorithms that were implemented in other boards like VIP-T video detection board for analogue cameras. The company claims this ensures high reliability and a low false alarm rate of this new IP version right from the start.

Data, events and alarms generated by the VIP-IP detector boards are handled by Traficon’s Flux management system. The main goal of Flux is to manage and control all traffic information generated by these various detectors and to make it useful, meaningful and relevant to the user.

Traficon has been awarded several AID tunnel projects in the UK over the past few years, with the Tyne, Hatfield and Medway Tunnels as the major examples. Last year, the company successfully commissioned 40 VIP-T AID detector boards in the northbound Blackwall tunnel, which is set to be a crucial traffic gateway towards the Olympic stadium in East London during the upcoming Summer Olympic Games.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Wavetronix radar-based traffic sensor cuts costs
    May 30, 2013
    While initial cost of radar based detection may be higher than that traditional loops, lower maintenance costs more than balance the books. Following successful field tests, the US city of Greenville, North Carolina, has recently agreed a new policy of phasing in Wavetronix traffic sensor technology’s radar-based SmartSensor Matrix system across its signalised traffic intersections. City traffic engineer Rik DiCesare expects the incremental implementation to deliver benefits to both the city’s taxpayers an
  • Flir helps Indonesia start tackling congestion
    March 19, 2014
    Indonesia has started tackling acute traffic congestion in Jakarta and Surabaya. When talking about Jakarta, Indonesia’s economic, cultural and political centre, it is very easy to lapse into superlatives. With a population of over 10 million people it is the thirteenth most populated city in the world and the biggest in South East Asia. The official metropolitan area, known as Jabodetabek, is also the second largest in the world. Almost 98% of journeys in Jabodetabek are made by road and the tremendous
  • New opportunities in a data-rich future
    March 19, 2014
    Jason Barnes looks at where the detection and monitoring sector is heading. In the future, there will be no such thing as an un-instrumented road. Just a short time ago, that could have been a quote from a high-level policy document but with the first arrivals of vehicles with 802.11p connectivity – the door-opener to Vehicle-to-X (V2X) applications – it’s a statement which has increasing validity. The technology which uses our roads will also provide information on road conditions but V2X isn’t the only
  • When traffic data can get it totally wrong
    November 30, 2021
    How can a highway devoid of traffic provide data suggesting it is filled with vehicles crawling along? Michael Vardi of Valerann provides an insight into how data can easily be skewed - and what can be done to prevent it