Smart Shared Poles Deployed in Creative Park: AI Video Analytics Builds a Pedestrian Safety Network
Being out in public is no longer just routine. As high-traffic, open-air complexes host performances, commercial crowds, and vehicle traffic all at once, finding a more immediate and efficient way to protect pedestrian safety has becomea key challenge for smart cityupgrades.
In thiscultural park partnershipthe park's existing roadside infrastructure is no longer limited to lighting and surveillance. Through a smart multi-use pole integrating cameras and AI video analytics, the streetlight system has evolved into a 24-hour security outpost and operational data hub, helping the park strike a better balance between "security management" and "event operations."
What Is a Smart Multi-Use Pole?
Streetlights originally served only for lighting; once equipped with LEDs and remote on/off, dimming, and fault-reporting features, they evolved into centrally manageablesmart streetlights. Building on this, further integrating surveillance cameras, environmental sensors, communication equipment, or digital signage into one pole creates a multi-use smart pole.
Asmart multi-use poleemphasizes "sharing and consolidation" even further: it consolidates streetlights, surveillance, signage, and communication equipment that were once scattered along a street into a single pole and conduit structure, with power and communication interfaces reserved for future phased expansion of sensors, alerts, 5G, or charging modules, enabling more centralized, orderly maintenance and management, making it an important roadside node for smart cities.
Once Deployed, Lighting Becomes a Manageable Urban Safety Network
- Energy Savings and Centralized Maintenance:Replacing traditional fixtures with LEDs can cut per-fixture power use by over 50%, while also reducing maintenance frequency and management costs, lowering overall total cost of ownership.
- AI Predicts Risk, Improving Pedestrian Safety:At park entrances and areas where pedestrians and vehicles cross paths, AI can instantly identify risk and trigger alerts, shifting safety management from after-the-fact review to proactive early warning.
- One Pole, Many Uses, High Expansion Efficiency:The multi-use pole integrates multiple facilities, allowing fast future expansion of sensing, alert, and communication modules with less repeated construction.
- Improved Streetscape and Less Construction Disruption:Consolidating equipment and conduits reduces visual clutter and repeated excavation, improving the quality of public spaces.
Pro-Link x VCA Case Study | AI Video Analytics on Smart Multi-Use Poles in a Cultural Park
1. Background: A High-Traffic, Multi-Entrance Mixed-Use Cultural Park
The park sits beside Taipei Dome, a landmark cultural destination. Having transformed from a historic site into a hub for performances and commerce, its daily operations must balance heritage preservation, event order, and pedestrian/vehicle flow, facing three key management challenges:
- Complex, Overlapping Traffic Patterns:Pedestrians walking, vehicles entering and exiting, event queues, and people resting all coexist, making management highly demanding.
- Sudden Surges in Foot Traffic:Weekends and performance periods often see sudden crowd surges, straining security staffing and on-site coordination.
- Insufficient Real-Time Data:Manual patrols and headcounts cannot capture multi-entrance dynamics in real time, and foot traffic is hard to translate into comparable, trackable operational metrics.
2. Solution: Smart Multi-Use Pole Cameras Connected to the VCA AI Bridge, Forming a Real-Time Recognition Hub
The park already had a smart multi-use pole pilot in place. This project used the IP cameras on the park's existing smart poles, connecting them to the VCA AI Bridge on the back end as a hub for AI recognition and data aggregation, performing real-time video analytics and statistics to consolidate foot traffic data from each entrance, upgrading the park from merely "seeing" to "understanding and managing."
Key features of this deployment include:
- Compact Hardware, Powerful Performance:Built on the Jetson Orin edge computing platform, a compact device supports multi-channel AI licensing and real-time processing needs.
- Reliable Accuracy Even in Dense Crowds:Uses head-and-shoulder feature recognition, maintaining stable detection performance even in crowded conditions with complex backgrounds.
3. Turning Data into Value: Turning Foot Traffic into an "Event KPI"
After deployment, the park moved beyond simply knowing "how many people came today" to turning foot traffic into a trackable, comparable, and predictable operational KPI, forming the basis for event evaluation and resource allocation decisions, for example:
- Event Period Comparison:Comparing foot traffic between event periods vs. non-event days, or the week before an event vs. event week, to quantify the impact an event drives.
- Hourly Traffic Curve:Understanding peak and off-peak rhythms to optimize staffing schedules and security placement, reducing on-site pressure.
- Cyclical Trends:Analyzing differences across weekdays/weekends, holidays, and rainy days, used to forecast crowd levels for different periods and prepare ahead of time.
- Entrance and Zone Capacity:Comparing traffic differences across entrances to assess whether additional signage, flow control, or routing adjustments are needed.
- Quantified Evidence for Tenant Recruitment and Partnerships:Using traffic curves and zone exposure data instead of vague descriptions like "lots of people," strengthening the case for tenant pitches and partnerships.
- Location Value Assessment:Provides reference data for rental pricing, pop-up store site selection, and exhibition layout decisions.
4. Protecting Pedestrian Safety: Real-Time Alerts for Shared Pedestrian-Vehicle Risk
On shared pedestrian-vehicle routes in the park, the system combines AI video analytics with on-site digital signage. When a vehicle approaches or the risk of a pedestrian-vehicle conflict rises, it instantly displays a warning message,"Watch for Pedestrians,"heightening driver awareness and reducing the risk of collisions, so pedestrian safety no longer depends solely on staff patrols and after-the-fact review but can be addressed with immediate alerts and intervention.
5. Incident Retrieval Efficiency: VCA Forensics Turns a Needle-in-a-Haystack Search into Precise Retrieval
In a high-traffic, multi-entrance open park, incidents like a lost child or a missing item are not uncommon. The challenge is often not "no footage exists" but "too much footage to review."
In the past, finding a lost child wearing a red shirt required security staff to review dozens of cameras, enduring hours or even days of fast-forwarded footage by eye. This labor-intensive approach is highly inefficient, and visual fatigue often causes staff to miss the golden window for rescue or response.
VCA Forensics: Turning "Hours" into "Minutes"
With VCA Forensics in place, incident review can move from "frame-by-frame review" to "condition-based search," dramatically shortening the time it takes to find a lead:
- Cross-Channel Narrowing:Search multiple cameras simultaneously, quickly narrowing suspicious footage by time and entrance.
- Person and Belongings Tracking:Quickly filter targets using clues like clothing color, appearance features, or carried items.
- Fast Lost-Item Location:Trace the last appearance and likely path of a lost item based on its characteristics, improving response efficiency.
With the Forensics platform, the park can improve incident retrieval efficiency by several times over, turning "massive, inefficient manual review" into "efficient data retrieval," significantly reducing labor and time costs while strengthening the park's ability to respond immediately to unexpected incidents.
Smart Multi-Use Poles Are More Than Hardware Consolidation: A Scalable Foundation for Urban Governance
This cultural park case used smart multi-use poles as roadside nodes, connected to the VCA AI Bridge and the Forensics search platform, successfully proving the real-world value of "real-time video processing + data-driven KPIs + public safety alerts" in a park-type setting.
This architecture is highly scalable, with future phases able to add 5G small cells, environmental sensors, renewable energy, or charging modules as needed, allowing smart multi-use poles to evolve further into a city-level smart foundation that balances operational management, public safety, and streetscape quality.