MuHu
Increasing Road Safety through Visual Intelligence

Having been a part of the automotive technology space for over 12 years, industry veteran Blake Gasca was driven to build a visual intelligence platform that can run local image processing and streaming. Making the most of the evolving machine learning landscape and his vast experience, Gasca laid the foundation of MuHu. The company takes a novel approach to road safety by giving real-time information to drivers via the MuHu platform through live and historic videos of the road ahead, enabling them to avoid accidents. MuHu utilizes existing mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to stream video that is automatically transmitted to the cloud, eliminating the need for proprietary hardware. After garnering all the data, MuHu forwards it to relevant parties like insurance companies, fleet managers, and cab service agencies for future reference.

Gasca foresees ‘distracted driving’ to be a major crisis in the coming years. In such situations, insurance companies can only roll out precautionary campaigns, and nothing more. “At MuHu, we have the ability to capture and determine if a driver is driving erratically by utilizing sensors,” notes Gasca, CEO, MuHu. MuHu recognizes that there are several kinds of data beneficial for transportation—for instance, data concerning weather or road congestion—which are currently siloed. The MuHu platform brings in all such transportation-oriented data through an open API while also supporting information from third-party applications to cross-reference if the data collected is relevant and genuine.

The uniqueness of MuHu lies in its competence to untangle the intricacies of the human brain by leveraging artificial neural networks and big data. MuHu’s dash camera records a driver’s every action in conjunction with vehicle statistics like speed, location, and duration—presenting an overall insight of the driver’s behavior. Taking the given data points into account, MuHu’s driver safety app notifies the driver of any imminent road hazard through alerts.

Furthermore, MuHu’s video intelligence platform sets up a huge knowledge base of automatic reactions which is sent to a neural system that analyzes the mental state of the driver and verifies if he/she is distracted. “Ironically, computers need to learn about human driving as much as we learn from them,” elucidates Gasca. The prime focus here is the cross-understanding of human and machine behavior and MuHu provides the means to acquire the data that bridges this gap.

The uniqueness of MuHu lies in its competence to untangle the intricacies of the human brain by leveraging artificial neural networks and big data

The team at MuHu believes video intelligence can be used in a wide variety of educational and commercial applications. To cite a relevant instance, one of MuHu’s clients was dealing with the problem of catastrophic accidents that occurred once every year and approached MuHu for a solution to mitigate the problem. MuHu introduced its visual intelligence platform to the client that provided drivers with real-time audio and visual warnings of upcoming hazards, thereby preventing mishaps. In worst cases where there were no human witnesses to an accident, MuHu emerges as the sole witness capable of revealing what had really happened. Within just a year, the client was able to reduce the accident ratio by half in comparison to the year before.

MuHu today draws on the gamification model to augment the engagement of drivers with its video analytics system and actualize the vision of making roads safer—an invaluable proposition that money can’t buy. MuHu’s roadmap of gamification prepares users to compete with other drivers—in their fleet, family, or area—with the intent of advocating safer driving habits.