Project Goal and Vision

Project Smart Bus Stop (SBS) consists of an application, a sociological survey and a legal review. The application is primarily for infotainment displays at bus stops, with the concept of "safe and smart bus stop" at its core. It provides live information such as a feed of buses arriving or in transit nearby and schedules. Additionally, other informational pages can be easily added to it. Examples of these kind of pages, that were created, are weather and social media feeds. At the bus stops, when used through a dedicated display, the application can also make use of computer vision for collecting metrics about bus stop and display usage.

One of the considerations when it came to the application was that users and passengers should also be able to take the application content with them by opening it on their smart devices as a web page, thus making it portable and scalable with no user installation required.

The project received an honorable mention at the 2018 ICT Showroom event for "Best Everyday Application". The topic of safe and smart bus stop was provided and supported by Teleste.

Implementation

The implementation was done using Python and the Flask micro-framework. For the computer vision aspect OpenCV and Tensorflow were used while PostgreSQL DBMS was used for storing collected data. The implementation was done using web technologies because it allowed the application to exist simultaneously as a dedicated kiosk application for use at information display while remaining scalable by allowing it to be used with mobile devices as well. The application was designed to be modular by making the frontend kiosk application and the computer vision components completely independent of each other.

For its primary data sources the application makes use of GTFS feed and real time tracking information provided by the city of Turku as open data. For distribution NFC tags and QR codes could be used.

Future development

Since the main purpose of the application is to aggregate information for the consumer at a bus stop the potential for future development is centered around finding what relevant information should be on the display and allowing all of the current information to be remotely updated (e.g. the price information, which remains currently static due to lack of necessary data sources).

Sociological Survey

A sociological survey concerning (in)security, trust, camera surveillance, face detection/recognition and privacy was collected online as a part of this project. There were 309 answers to the questionnaire. People reported that they feel themselves safe, they trusted the officials and they felt that camera surveillance was acceptable. In addition, privacy was important to the participants. However, the participants felt that face detection/recognition was not acceptable unless it was controlled by the officials.

Legal Review

The developed prototype is legally feasible, of course with some adjustments. The fact that data is permanently anonymized and stored in this way, makes the concept more friendly with regard to the rights of passengers and users. The legal side and in particular the new GDPR legislation was also considered in the design for the survey.