Method and apparatus for infraction management

Abstract

The system provides a way to detect potential impaired driving and to easily and automatically report it to enforcement officials. The system can create a video record of the impaired driving and send the video to an enforcement official who can be notified to intercept the impaired driver. In one embodiment, the system can be implemented on a stand-alone system or a smartphone. The system uses video recording technology and a tracking system to identify vehicles making excessive numbers of lane changes, failure to maintain a lane, unusual vehicle speed behaviors, and the like. Based on vehicle behavior, the system can determine if a particular vehicle is exhibiting behavior that indicates impaired driving. The system can record video of the vehicle behavior and send it to the nearest enforcement officer.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . An apparatus for detecting and reporting traffic incidents comprising:
 a processing device in a first vehicle and comprising;
 an image capture module for recording video of images of a second vehicle in front of the first vehicle and showing the video on a display; 
 a vehicle detector module for detecting a second vehicle in the captured image; 
 a license plate reader for capturing a license plate number of the second vehicle; 
 an analyzer engine for reviewing the video to determine if the second car has committed a traffic incident, where in the analyzer engine uses artificial intelligence (AI) to determine if the traffic incident by the second vehicle is present; 
 a reporting module for capturing a segment of the video that includes the detected traffic incident and forwarding the video segment to a processing center. 
   
     
     
         2 . The apparatus of  claim 1  wherein the processing device is a smartphone mounted in the first vehicle. 
     
     
         3 . The apparatus of  claim 2  wherein a human reviews the video segment to confirm if the traffic incident is present and the video segment is forwarded to an enforcement authority when the human also determines the traffic incident is present. 
     
     
         4 . The apparatus of  claim 3  wherein the video segment includes an identification of the traffic incident. 
     
     
         5 . The apparatus of  claim 4  wherein the video segment includes an image of the license plate of the second vehicle is displayed in the video segment. 
     
     
         6 . The apparatus of  claim 5  wherein the video segment includes the location and time of the traffic incident. 
     
     
         7 . The apparatus of  claim 6  wherein the segment is provided to the analyzer engine to improve AI performance. 
     
     
         8 . The apparatus of  claim 7  wherein the traffic incident comprises one or more of speeding, unsafe lane change, drunk driving, following too closely, failure to stop, car pool lane violation, illegal U-Turn, driving on shoulder, and red light violation. 
     
     
         9 . The apparatus of  claim 8  wherein the analyzer engine assigns a point for each of a plurality of metrics required to identify the traffic incident and only reporting the traffic incident when there are sufficient points in the segment to identify the traffic incident. 
     
     
         10 . The apparatus of  claim 9  wherein a driver of the first vehicle can initiate the reporting of the traffic incident by tapping on the display.