AIVR Cloud
What is it
AIVR Cloud is the cloud-based data infrastructure underpinning One Big Circle’s Automated Intelligent Video Review (AIVR) technology.
Using Edge computing technology, it coordinates hundreds of asset monitoring devices across the UK rail network, ensuring they operate as a unified, intelligent system. The Cloud provides connectivity and scalability, allowing data collected from devices to be aggregated, processed and accessed in real time.
Why it matters
Before the widespread adoption of Cloud based architectures, rail monitoring data was physically transferred between systems – downloaded manually, stored on drives and couriered to analysts. By contrast, AIVR, using a Cloud based approach, enables devices to beam data directly to engineers via the AIVR Platform. This transformation allows high-quality visual, geometric and third-party data to be integrated, analysed and shared across engineering disciplines within hours, not days.
The Cloud also underpins OBC’s ability to scale up: as the number of devices grows, AIVR Cloud dynamically expands its capacity to handle greater data volumes (this is also known as elastic scaling). It achieves this efficiently through Edge computing.
When: key dates
The AIVR platform, introduced in 2019, marked OBC’s major step into Cloud-based monitoring, building on the company’s previous Cloud experience in transport and sports video applications. Cloud computing itself emerged in the early 2000s, becoming mainstream by the 2010s as services like AWS and Azure matured.
While Microsoft says that Edge computing was explicitly conceived during discussions about the future of cloud computing in October 2008, software engineers had discussed the idea of more distributed client-server systems since the 1960s. The rise of the web in the 1990s exposed scalability and congestion problems in purely centralised server models, and in 1998 content delivery networks (CDNs) proposed distributing caching servers geographically close to users to reduce congestion and latency – another step toward edge computing.
With the huge increase in the movement of data brought about by the rise of the Internet of Things in the 2010s, the advantages of Edge computing became increasingly evident through the 2020s.
Where it is used
AIVR Cloud operates in distributed Cloud data centres but serves field-deployed ‘Edge’ devices across the UK rail network – including lineside, depot and train-mounted AIVR units. These devices connect via encrypted internet or private network links to the central AIVR Cloud, where the incoming video and sensor data are processed and catalogued for review and analysis.
Who uses it
AIVR Cloud primarily serves rail infrastructure engineers, data analysts and inspection teams across Network Rail and related operators. It provides a platform for accessing, reviewing and managing condition monitoring data, supporting tasks from vegetation analysis to track geometry inspection.
How it works
Each Edge device records high-resolution video and sensor data, pre-processes it locally and uploads only the essential outputs to AIVR Cloud. This approach avoids excessive backlogs – a risk when transferring vast video datasets (as AIVR does). By using selective data offloading, machine learning compression, and scalable cloud storage, AIVR maintains real-time performance. Just as Netflix placed data at the ‘Edge’ to eliminate streaming delays, OBC uses Edge processing to optimise uploads, letting the Cloud focus on coordination and analytics rather than raw data transport.
OBC engineers are continually evaluating opportunities to place more compute on the Edge, which would enable even more data to be processed. This is always evaluated against the challenges of Edge Compute, requiring increased resources such as power, weight and size, which are often at a premium in the locations where AIVR Edge devices are fitted.