Clean Up Your City with Matroid

Matroid’s Graffiti Detector detecting instances of graffiti on walls.

Problem: Graffiti is all over the place in cities, buses, trains, freeway signs, and it can be an eye sore to look at.

Graffiti or vandalism is the act of painting whether it be with brushes or spray paint, on someone else’s property without their consent. Finding active acts of graffiti and stopping them is currently a monumental task. Unless a police officer witnesses someone vandalizing property or another person reports vandalism the crime will not be stopped and property damage will occur. Oftentimes with the way that graffiti occurs, it is nearly impossible to stop graffitiing from occurring. In short, the current solutions cannot keep up with the sheer number of vandalism cases in any given city.

Matroid’s Graffiti Detector finding someone in the process of graffitiing, examples of graffiti detected.

Solution: Graffiti Detector for Smart City Cameras

To help solve this critical problem, Matroid has created a Graffiti Detector. This detector can be used as a baseline for understanding what is possible within Matroids Computer Vision Solution.

Automated inspection can be performed with a Matroid detector, an “automated pair of eyes” that leverages state-of-the-art computer vision to find objects of interest (graffiti) in visual media. Matroid’s software can be installed across existing hardware systems (cameras) in the city to detect graffiti whenever it occurs. This is a game-changer in the fight against vandalism.

Using Matroid’s Studio, a user can train detectors with practically any visual media dataset. For this project, we built a dataset of various different types of graffiti using Matroid Studio. After the dataset was built, we then trained the detector with the press of a button. Within minutes, we had a detector that could identify the presence of graffiti within any landscape. With less than an hour of work, we had a graffiti detector that would have otherwise taken weeks or months to train from scratch.

Matroid’s Graffiti Detector finding graffiti and analyzing a wall section pre and post graffiti.

Building detectors for graffiti is one of many examples of Matroid helping to improve smart cities and operational efficiency. To learn more about how Matroid could help you, get in touch with us today.