“AI Urban Management Officer” is Here: An Automated Street Vending Detection System Built on OpenMV

Illegal street vending recurs frequently; the challenge in governance lies not in “detecting it once” but in its “long-term persistence.” OpenMV enables continuous visual monitoring, shifting management from periodic rectification campaigns to daily situational awareness.

Illegal street vending is a common issue in urban governance; business facilities such as stalls, shelves, and tables encroach upon pedestrian walkways or vehicular roads, not only disrupting traffic order but also posing safety hazards—particularly prominent during morning and evening rush hours or in densely populated areas.

Managing through manual inspections incurs high labour costs and makes it difficult to achieve long-term, continuous supervision, thus easily resulting in management blind spots where problems recur immediately after personnel leave.

Based on SingTown’s OpenMV intelligent camera, automated and routine visual monitoring can be conducted in key sections, areas surrounding schools, commercial districts, and other locations prone to recurring incidents.

After the camera is fixedly deployed, OpenMV runs object detection algorithms on the edge device to automatically identify objects related to encroachment on public space, such as stalls, shelves, sunshades, and trolleys. Meanwhile, by integrating road boundaries, pedestrian walkway areas, and configured virtual rule lines, it determines in real time whether any encroachment behaviour has occurred.

When the system detects that business facilities encroach upon roads, obstruct pedestrian pathways, or exceed the scope of their licensed business operations, it can instantly output identification results at the edge device for on-site alerts, evidence collection for violations, or automatic reporting to the urban management platform, thereby providing objective evidence for subsequent law enforcement.

Leveraging the on-device AI capabilities and edge deployment advantages of OpenMV, the management and regulation of illegal road occupation have shifted from periodic rectification to continuous perception and real-time detection, significantly reducing the burden on manual inspections and enhancing both the responsiveness and precision of urban governance.