COWI

About COWI

COWI is a leading international consulting group specializing in engineering, environmental science, and economics. The company provides services to improve infrastructure and the environment worldwide.

The Challenge

COWI launched DDG in 2016, an “on demand” service for professional use with HD panoramas of the Danish road network developed from image material collected by COWI’s cars. Ensuring accuracy, the maintenance of DDG entails a complete photographic documentation of the entire Danish road system every two years - all 108,000 km of road network, amounting to almost 150 single or 30 million panoramic images in HD quality.

In relation to GDPR, neither persons nor number plates on vehicles must be identifiable. Both faces and license plates must be blurred. COWI had an overall ambition to upgrade the existing DDG set-up with the purpose of getting a more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution, where the workflow for processing the image material was automated to a much greater degree.

Our Solution

Cloud2 (formerly known as KeyCore) was chosen as a partner for the design of a cloud infrastructure, in which the processing of image material could take place more cost-effectively and scalable compared to the existing on-prem solution.

The processing of the image material for DDG was migrated to an AWS cloud infrastructure. The setup was orchestrated in accordance with the strict guidelines of GDPR. With AWS S3 Standard, COWI has gained access to maximum capacity during the short period image material is being processed. The long-term storage is handled in AWS S3 Glacier.

With the cloud infrastructure orchestrated by Cloud2, COWI was able to ensure that the entire process was automated and streamlined using ML. The use of ML includes several different Deep Learning Convolution Neural Networks (CNN), where the neural networks are “trained” on already classified images and subsequently can classify and identify new material.

Results

By migrating to the AWS cloud, COWI has gained access to the highest possible level of compliance for everything below the hypervisor line. With the cloud infrastructure developed by Cloud2, the post processing has become much more automated, which ensures a fast and efficient process from when the image material is uploaded until it is ready for publication in DDG.

In addition to ensure the GDPR-demanded blurring of faces and license plates, the post processing in the cloud also includes stitching of the panoramic images, correction of the image quality and a dashboard for monitoring the status.