Reference
Counting traffic from footage you already have
A classified count does not require roadside hardware. It requires a view of the carriageway and enough pixels on each vehicle as it crosses the line. Here is what makes existing footage usable, and the honest reason a lot of it is not.
What actually governs the result
| Survey | Median height | Accuracy |
|---|---|---|
| A | 94 px | 94.2% |
| B | 89 px | 88.4% |
| C | 86 px | 88.9% |
Read this first
Most existing CCTV was not mounted for counting
Corridor cameras are usually installed for surveillance, incident detection or number-plate capture. Those jobs want a shallow, near-horizontal view down the road, because that is what reads a plate.
Counting wants the opposite: a higher mounting with a steeper view, so vehicles travelling side by side stay separate in the image. On a shallow view in dense two-wheeler traffic they overlap, and overlapping vehicles are the most common cause of under-counting we see.
So the useful answer is not “yes, send anything”. It is: send fifteen minutes and we will tell you what that position is costing you before you plan a survey around it.
ATMS or corridor CCTV
Already recording, already powered, already permitted. The usual catch is mounting angle — see below.
A drone pass
A near-vertical view separates vehicles travelling side by side better than almost anything at ground level.
A network survey vehicle or dashcam
Suited to distress and chainage work rather than volume counts, since the camera is moving with traffic.
A phone on a pole
Genuinely sufficient at 1080p with a rigid mount. Most short counts do not need more than this.
What you avoid
Three procurement problems that disappear
None of these are about detection quality. They are the reasons a survey slips, and they come from the hardware rather than the counting.
Nothing to install
No roadside unit to procure, permit, power, or guard against theft on a live corridor.
No per-kilometre fee
The licence is bound to a machine, not to a length of road or a number of sites.
The footage never leaves
It is processed on your own machines, offline. For work under a government client, that is often the deciding constraint rather than a preference.
If you are specifying a new camera
Four things worth getting right
Where the position is still yours to choose, these matter more than the camera’s brand or its stated resolution.
- Mount high, look down. Steeper views separate side-by-side vehicles.
- Put the counting line in the nearer half of the frame, not far up the road.
- See the full width being surveyed; give each carriageway its own view where a median divides them.
- 1080p or better, at a bitrate that does not smear small fast objects. Over-compression removes exactly what two-wheeler detection needs.
The full list, with the reasoning behind each, is on the accuracy page — including where our own figures degrade and why.
Check your own camera
Fifteen minutes tells us the answer
Send a clip from the camera you were planning to use. We will return the classified count and a straight assessment of the position — including if the answer is that this camera is in the wrong place.
Send us footage