Hasselt (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Hasselt University’s IMOB, with international company Tatweer, will use AI to develop a system predicting optimal times for speed cameras, aiming to improve road safety and enforcement efficiency. Professor Ansar Yasar will lead the research.
As VRT News reported, Hasselt University has started a major project to use artificial intelligence to make roads safer. Professor Ansar Yasar will lead the research. The team plans to build a system that can monitor traffic in real time and detect several violations at the same time. It will recognise speeding, running red lights, and illegal lane changes.
“The system does this by combining accident statistics, road layout, and camera footage,”
says Yasar.
What can Hasselt University’s AI system do to improve road safety?
The new system will also be able to predict dangerous situations before they happen. It will analyse traffic patterns and driver behaviour to alert authorities about potential risks.
“For road safety, for example, it’s much more important to enforce traffic in school neighbourhoods around the start and end of the school day,”
explains Professor Wim Ectors of IMOB.
Authorities say a new traffic enforcement system could gain more public support. Expert Ectors points out that social acceptance of fines is currently low. Many drivers feel enforcement is random or unfair. The system being developed at Hasselt University is designed to focus only on real violations.
Officials mentioned that privacy will be carefully protected in the project. Researchers will use strict anonymisation to keep people’s identities and personal information safe. The system will track traffic behaviour without collecting unnecessary private data. The first results of the study are expected within 2 years.
“It can’t be the intention for the researchers to be able to track everyone. That will therefore be impossible,”
says Ectors.
“No data will be tracked either.”
Hasselt University has been working on traffic safety and artificial intelligence since 2023. Earlier in 2025, Professor Ansar Yasar took a new chair to lead research on using AI for road safety. The project comes as speeding and red-light violations have increased in Belgian cities between 2020 and 2024. Authorities are also concerned that many drivers see fines as unfair.
