Dash - a new website to view and analyse dash cam videos

[Nigel]

Here's a selection of roundabouts local to my area.

And you drive around roundabouts anti-clockwise

What is the point of that last roundabout, it only has two exits?

 

[Dashmellow]

And you drive around roundabouts anti-clockwise

What is the point of that last roundabout, it only has two exits?

Still at it I see.

The last one allows drivers to turn around and go back in the direction from which they came and they are always part of a chain of roundabouts along smaller roads where some of the roundabouts are four way, some are three way and some are two way. You'll see them outside smaller towns and villages and these roads and roundabouts connect to other similar sized small towns and villages.

 

[Nigel]

Most high speed accidents do not occur at traffic lights but on long straight interstate highways. While traffic accidents do occur fairly frequently at traffic lights and other types of four way intersections there are many factors involved in the frequency and type of motor vehicle accidents in a country as vast as the US.

We seem to see a lot of videos of crashes at red lights in the USA, but yes, there are also a lot of people spinning and playing pinball on dead straight freeways. Neither of these is common from UK videos.

There are certainly some big differences to the UK:

66% of traffic fatalities are caused by aggressive driving. (SafeMotorist.com, 2019)
37% of aggressive driving incidents involve a firearm. (SafeMotorist.com, 2019)
2% of drivers admit to trying to run an aggressor off the road at least once. (SafeMotorist.com, 2019)
0.1% of drivers admitted to regularly bumping or ramming other vehicles intentionally. (AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 2016)
On a single day during the 2017-2018 school year, 108,623 school bus drivers across the country reported that 83,944 vehicles passed their stopped school buses illegally. (Source: https://driving-tests.org/driving-statistics/)

 

[Dashmellow]

We seem to see a lot of videos of crashes at red lights in the USA, but yes, there are also a lot of people spinning and playing pinball on dead straight freeways. Neither of these is common from UK videos.

There are certainly some big differences to the UK:

You like to do comparisons like this but they are meaningless internet drivel. Your main goal is always USA disparagement regardless of the subject matter.

In yesterday's episode you tried to imply a connection between the The Star Spangled Banner, our National Anthem, and guns in America except that in lyrics "the rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air" that you referred to they were fired by the British during the War of 1812 and the anthem is an ode to the fact that our flag was still standing at dawn after the British attack had been thwarted.

 

[Leonauto]

I think I read on the forum that he died of a moto accident? (not sure it was him).

Yes, it was...

 

[SawMaster]

Yes, it was...

It was one of the few times he apparently didn't have a cam mounted, so nobody knows exactly what happened A gifted programmer with a passion for dashcams.

@edvision
-
On differences I can only speculate based on what I've seen online. Our interstates are high-speed with seperated traffic lanes, so you don't have oncoming/departing traffic. But we do have many other highways separated with only paint markings on pavement with 55MPH speeds. People here don't like going slow. Traffic signs and signals are often overhead, signals are strung high across the other side of the intersection (thus my comments on "top center" speed stamping). Most of the time where there is marked pavement like lane direction arrow there's also roadside signage to match, but not always so a clear view of bottom center might have some value. Seems to be more common elsewhere to have only pavement markings for this.

Number plates here can be as multicolored and detailed (and hard to see) as a painting, so detailed zooming features can help immensely, as well as easy-to-use brightness and contrast settings which might get you a needed 'capture'. Most signs and some license plates use reflective paint; can be lots of glare in vids at night. Full range of weather and climate and geographic conditions from desert to arctic, tropical to trees to plains to hills, so you might need something from anywhere in a vid save for the corners under tough 'filming' circumstances.

Guess that about covers things here versus there. Best wishes with the program, I'm liking how it's coming around and can't wait to try it myself

Phil

 

[jokiin]

Number plates here can be as multicolored and detailed (and hard to see) as a painting

we have over 100 styles just in our state, each state here has their own options as well

Range Selector

 

[edvision]

@Dashmellow thanks for all the insights! It's like I am going through a crash course in US road topologies .

Number plates here can be as multicolored and detailed (and hard to see) as a painting, so detailed zooming features can help immensely, as well as easy-to-use brightness and contrast settings which might get you a needed 'capture'. Most signs and some license plates use reflective paint; can be lots of glare in vids at night. Full range of weather and climate and geographic conditions from desert to arctic, tropical to trees to plains to hills, so you might need something from anywhere in a vid save for the corners under tough 'filming' circumstances.

@SawMaster interesting. Identifying the numbers/letters on multicolored number plates sounds like a good AI problem hehe. In the meantime, we are also looking at providing zooming functionality in a video to give users more control of what specifically they want to investigate in their footage. Regarding the brightness/contrast settings, is there also a need to sometimes view the image in black & white only?

I think the information panel on videos is something that we need to think about a bit more deeply. We will get back to you once we have a revised proposition.

we have over 100 styles just in our state, each state here has their own options as well

Range Selector

Thanks for sharing @jokiin - very useful link . It's crazy how varied it is. I wonder what the history behind all this is... We have kicked off some initial research on Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) but it is still in its infancy but we hope to showcase something in the coming months.

@Nigel I learned to drive in the UK but I am French so I now think Europeans are driving on the wrong side too, but maybe we are the ones in the wrong here .Having said that, driving in Paris seems more dangerous than London...

Stay safe and stay tuned for more updates on our part, we have some exciting stuff coming soon!

 

[jokiin]

It's crazy how varied it is. I wonder what the history behind all this is...

revenue, anything to get an extra dollar

 

[Nigel]

Regarding the brightness/contrast settings, is there also a need to sometimes view the image in black & white only?

I've never known that to help, can sometimes be useful to filter out the blue channel, and then display the result in monochrome, since that can remove focus issues, but it is probably only worth doing that as an input to your AI.

An auto brightness/contrast adjustment on the zoom might be useful, if the zoom is as an inset/magnifying glass rather than the whole image. So put the magnifying glass over a dark area and it brightens it, over a bright area and it darkens it, plus increases contrast.

@Nigel I learned to drive in the UK but I am French so I now think Europeans are driving on the wrong side too, but maybe we are the ones in the wrong here .Having said that, driving in Paris seems more dangerous than London...

It used to be the case that most of the world drove on the left, in the UK that dates back to the roman empire, supposedly because when you are riding a horse, a right handed person can defend themselves with their sword in their sword hand. The right side driving for most of the world came from Napoleon who was left handed so forcing everyone to ride on the right gave him an advantage, and also he refused to drive on the same side as the British. For the USA, it is apparently from their obsession with hand guns, which are used differently to swords.

Rose found that, "All available evidence seems to indicate that the RIGHT-HAND travel predominated in Colonial America from the time of the earliest settlements." The ox-team, the horseback rider, the handler of the lead horse, and even the pedestrian all traveled to the right. Travelers with hand guns carried their weapons in the hollows of their left arms and traveled to the right, the better to be ready if an oncoming stranger proved dangerous:

On The Right Side of the Road - General Highway History - Highway History - Federal Highway Administration

www.fhwa.dot.gov

Statistics show UK roads are much safer than French roads, and in fact that right lane drive countries are safer than left lane drive countries, if you ignore places like India where lane discipline is not very good because accidents are an act of god, not the ability of the driver!

 

[Paul Iddon]

I learned to drive in the UK but I am French

You didn't sound French...

Knowing that now I'm surprised you and Stathis understood my accent!

 

[Paul Iddon]

@edvision

Uploaded a 4K video from the Viofo A129 Pro where I knew the GPS was recording to the video

This one worked - showed all details.

 

[suparoo]

revenue, anything to get an extra dollar

I am surprised the police haven't cracked down on those red - blue - green etc plates that blend into the colour of the car.
Makes it extremely hard for the normal everyday person to be to to read the plate/s, if the vehicle is involved in a hit run - speeding etc. incident.

 

[jokiin]

I am surprised the police haven't cracked down on those red - blue - green etc plates that blend into the colour of the car.
Makes it extremely hard for the normal everyday person to be to to read the plate/s, if the vehicle is involved in a hit run - speeding etc. incident.

they recalled some of the red on black plates, those were very hard to see

 

[edvision]

You didn't sound French...

Knowing that now I'm surprised you and Stathis understood my accent!

I have been polishing my English since I came here over 15 years ago - now I speak French with an English accent !

For context everyone, we had a chat with Paul on Tuesday to get his impressions of Dash so far and get feedback on some secret feature we are developing in May...

Uploaded a 4K video from the Viofo A129 Pro where I knew the GPS was recording to the video

This one worked - showed all details.

Do you mind uploading the video to the same dropbox folder I shared with you? I will check it out. I know that we can extract the telematics from the A129 Duo but maybe the Pro is another story...

Do any of you use software to edit/stitch your dash cam videos? The people who post crash compilations on Youtube certainly do but we are not sure how big this group is.

Have a nice week-end everyone!

 

[Paul Iddon]

@edvision

Should be in the dropbox now Eddie.


I use Wondershare Filmora to edit videos.

 

[edvision]

Thanks @Paul Iddon ! Will check it out later today. I can see that you successfully uploaded a file with GPS and speed data last night. Was that from the A129 Pro?

Wondershare Filmora looks good! How much does it cost you? It seems it is a Desktop application.

 

[Nigel]

Do any of you use software to edit/stitch your dash cam videos?

I normally use ffmpeg, often just to cut and splice without recompression, thus no loss of quality.

There are a lot of different editors in use, many of them using ffmpeg to do the actual work.
I sometimes use VSDC, which is a free editor.

 

[edvision]

I normally use ffmpeg, often just to cut and splice without recompression, thus no loss of quality.

There are a lot of different editors in use, many of them using ffmpeg to do the actual work.
I sometimes use VSDC, which is a free editor.

@Nigel ffmpeg is a great tool if you are technical . Would it make sense sense for a platform like Dash to offer bookmarking of sections of videos (say 10 seconds within a video) where you could give custom tags, and then either allow searching or re-assembling of similar bookmarks across many videos into a single video? We're trying to understand whether this is a common use case.

 

[Nigel]

@NigelWould it make sense sense for a platform like Dash to offer bookmarking of sections of videos (say 10 seconds within a video) where you could give custom tags, and then either allow searching or re-assembling of similar bookmarks across many videos into a single video? We're trying to understand whether this is a common use case.

Very good question.

One of the reasons that Registrator Viewer was so popular is that it provided for marking sections of your journey (not individual loop recording files) and then splicing the sections together to produce an edited video, even though it didn't recompress any video, just copied it so that you kept original quality. I can see some people using your site only to access that feature. Only issue I have is the time and data bandwidth required to upload the files, but clearly a fair number of people have internet connections faster than disk drives, or do everything on the phone, so for some people that is really not an issue, assuming your server is fast enough.

I don't think the issue of doing it without recompression is important these days, the codecs used seem to have improved to the point where little gets lost anyway.

Clever editing features, like fade transitions between sections really aren't needed, the best videos use simple cut and splice, it is the video content that is important. Some people like to have captions, titles and subtitles. Also picture in picture, so that you can put the rear view in the corner of the front view, and be able to swap them over when the rear is more interesting than the front, or remove them when they are of no interest any more, also split screen for front and rear.

@Nigel ffmpeg is a great tool if you are technical .

Not sure "technical" is the right word, you simply need to understand the options available on the command line, how to write them, and how to put them together - engineering skills.