The smart sewer inspection system will be deployed in every district of Seoul next year. Seoul is set to become the first city in Korea to use artificial intelligent (AI) technologies to identify defects in its sewer network.
The “AI-based sewer defect detection system”, developed by Seoul Digital Foundation (SDF), will be deployed in every district of the capital next year. The system automatically identifies sewer problems from CCTV images using computer vision, and will replace manual pipeline inspection by public officials to pick out any irregularities.
AI will automatically sort the type and location of defects in the sewer by interpreting CCTV images, then pinpoint the faulty location on an inspector’s screen. To do this, SDF categorised 10 types of sewer defects and trained the AI with 5,000 CCTV image data over the last year.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) reports that with around 9,000km of public sewers across Seoul, detecting impairment to the circular sewers viewing hours of footage with an unaided eye was incredibly taxing.
SMG expects that once the sewer defect detection system is introduced, accuracy will increase while saving time, allowing the city to proactively prevent accidents from occurring.
