Headlines News
Milestone: Your car may be an Autobot

A series of billboards featured in cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta featured technology provided by Milestone and Canon that could identify the makes and models of certain vehicles as they approached. A display on a second billboard could then notify the driver that they may indeed be driving a “Transformer” — a vehicle/robot hybrid popularized in the Transformers movies and toy series.

Cars recognized included: Honda Civic, Ford Focus, Toyota Camry, Nissan Altima, and Chevy Malibu. Upon recognition, the driver would see the message “Attention Your Honda Civic is an Autobot!” as they passed by.

According to a Milestone blog post:

Lamar Advertising had previously worked with Milestone Solution Partner Intelliscape, on a digital billboard campaign where Milestone software,  Canon IP video cameras, and video analytics were integrated to identify certain makes and models of cars for the purpose of presenting responsive, targeted ad messaging. The solution included Canon VBH43 network video cameras mounted on another Lamar billboard about 1,000 feet ahead of the digital billboard. This allowed enough time for the data to be transmitted, a new targeted image to be delivered to the digital billboard, and time for the driver to look and see it in passing.
The cameras fed into Milestone XProtect Corporate video management software (VMS), which has an open platform that enables interoperability with other systems. The Intelliscape analytic solution integrated the VMS with proprietary analytics for car recognition that matches vehicles against a database of those with the same make and model.

Read more about the technology here.