Questions we get asked

Four things, and the list is fixed: garbage, potholes, construction debris and broken footpaths. Garbage means uncollected waste, black spots and overflowing bins. Debris means rubble, sand piles and cut branches left in the carriageway. Potholes means surface breaks, sunken patches and failing road edges. Footpaths means missing slabs, broken kerbs and damaged edging.

No. We use our own vehicles and our own drivers, and driving the ward is their only job. That is what makes the scanning continuous rather than something that happens when a department can spare a van.

A photograph, a bounding box, a segmentation mask, a severity, a coordinate and a time. Nothing arrives as a bare flag, because a flag cannot be acted on now or checked later.

It keeps running. Wards are scanned to a schedule rather than in response to a complaint, so the same street is seen again and again and a defect is found whether or not anyone reported it.

Into one console. The map carries everything the fleet has returned, filtered to the zone and the ward an official answers for. Any vehicle on the road can be watched from the same place, with the streets it has covered and the streets still left on it.

Every detection is scored high, medium or low when it is routed, and the score travels with it. What is open, what is overdue and what has escalated is visible ward by ward.

On evidence, not on someone's word. The contractor gets the route on their phone and photographs the work at the same coordinates as the detection, with the time recorded. The ward is then scanned again on its schedule. If the issue is gone, the closure stands.

The issue reopens. If the next round still sees it, or the resident who reported it says it is not fixed, it goes back against the officer in charge and then the commissioner. Closing something that is still there does not make it go away.

Yes, from an app, with a photograph and a location taken off the phone. It lands in the same queue as everything the vehicles find. Whoever reported it is told at every step what happened, and can send it back if the closure does not match the street.

They are blurred on the device inside the vehicle, before anything is sent anywhere. The blurring is not something applied later in the cloud.

That is what it is built for. Every detection carries a photograph, a coordinate and a time, and every closure carries proof of the same spot. A contractor's performance is a matter of record rather than a matter of dispute.

No. The same computer vision work runs inside hospitals, where a booth takes a patient's grievance in their own language, transcribes and summarises it, and puts it in one queue with a severity and a department already attached.

Either. They run at the edge or in the cloud, inside the infrastructure you already have, and they are trained on your own data rather than on a public benchmark.

It depends on how many wards you are covering, how many classes you are scanning for and what you already have running, so there is no list price to quote. Tell us what you are trying to cover and we will scope it. Write to contact@densetensor.com or use the enquiry form on this page.

That depends on the class, the conditions and the street, so a single headline figure would tell you very little about your city. Bring one ward and the problem you already know it has, and we will scan it and show you what comes back.