Use of Bing Maps for Automated Mobile Data Collection System
For some years users are anticipating such solutions that would integrated Bing Maps for operational data mapping. The developers of bing maps have been working to bring up some new and interesting implementations. One such interesting implementation of bing maps is the City of Houston Pavement Assessment System.
The city of Houston, Right of Way Division, bears the responsibility to maintain almost 16,000 lane miles of collector, local streets and arterial roads that lie in the city limits. The choice of streets for patching or asphalt overlay will depend on some pavement condition ratings. These ratings differ for the different street sections of the city. Until know the city used manual methods for gathering this information. For this two people, hired for filed work, needed to personally visit different street in different parts of the city and then visually access that pavement.
It is not hard to guess, how time consuming and uncomfortable this process was. Because of this the data collected in most cases was either not perfect or out-of-date or both. Thus the ability of Houston to perform analysis for better city management was seriously affected. Houston required some system which could enable to collect such pavement data automatically, quickly, and accurately.
Bing Maps was the system which solved its problem. Houston in association with Idea Integration which is a partner of Microsoft, developed the system called Automated Mobile Data Collection System.
The whole system can be divided into two smaller subsystems. One of them is the Vehicle system which is situated in a vehicle van used for data collection. This vehicle van drives to different parts of the city and collects essential video, data and images of the area through which it passes. The process of collecting the data is automatic and there is no operator required for that purpose. The second part of the Automated Mobile Data Collection System is the Office system. The data post processing is carried out by this system.
During the use of Automated Mobile Data Collection System, data is collected by automatic devices like lasers, scan cameras, media video cameras, etc. Thus the roughness and rutting of roads, pictures, videos, etc are easily collected and stored. The data collection vehicle is also equipped with a GPS device. This device is powerful enough to measure accurate positions of the vehicle. It also tags the collected data with pertinent metadata.
Then this data is sent to the office system. The data that is received by the Office system is raw data. It needs to be processed. The data that is taken from the video cameras is processed and converted into a 360° video, while special proprietary post processing software is used for processing the line scan camera images. The processing software searches for cracks in the road, or such physical irregularities and reports them. All the data and reports obtained by Office system are stored in Microsoft SQL Server. For presenting the data to users, an SQL reporting service is used.
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