Traffic Monitoring from the Perspective of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (original) (raw)

From images to traffic behavior - A UAV tracking and monitoring application

2007 10th International Conference on Information Fusion, 2007

An implemented system for achieving high level situation awareness about traffic situations in an urban area is described. It takes as input sequences of color and thermal images which are used to construct and maintain qualitative object structures and to recognize the traffic behavior of the tracked vehicles in real time. The system is tested both in simulation and on data collected during test flights. To facilitate the signal to symbol transformation and the easy integration of the streams of data from the sensors with the GIS and the chronicle recognition system, DyKnow, a stream-based knowledge processing middleware, is used. It handles the processing of streams, including the temporal aspects of merging and synchronizing streams, and provides suitable abstractions to allow high level reasoning and narrow the sense reasoning gap.

Monitoring road traffic with a UAV-based system

2018 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2018

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an attractive solution for road traffic monitoring because of their mobility, low cost, and broad view range. Up to now, existing traffic monitoring systems based on UAVs only use one UAV with fixed trajectory to extract information about vehicles. In this paper, we propose a road traffic monitoring system using multiple UAVs. We develop a method to generate adaptive UAVs trajectories, which is based on the tracking of moving points in the UAV field of view. Also we generate UAVs trajectories using mobility models that are usually used to model vehicles mobility. UAVs monitor the traffic on a city road, they are responsible for collecting and sending, in real time, vehicle information to a traffic processing center for traffic regulation purposes. We show that the performance of our system is better than the performance of the fixed UAV trajectory traffic monitoring system in terms of coverage rates and events detection rates.

Traffic data acquirement by unmanned aerial vehicle

European Journal of Remote Sensing

This paper presents a methodology aimed to acquire traffic flow data through the employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The study is focused on the determination of driving behavior parameters of road users and on the reconstruction of traffic flow Origin/ Destination matrix. The methodology integrates UAV flights with video image processing technique, and the capability of geographic information systems, to represent spatiotemporal phenomena. In particular, analyzing different intersections, the attention of the authors is focused on users' gap acceptance in a naturalistic drivers' behavior condition (drivers are not influenced by the presence of instruments and operators on the roadway) and on the reconstruction of vehicle paths. Drivers' level of aggressiveness is determined by understanding how drivers decide that a gap is crossable and, consequently, how their behavior is critical in relation to a moving stream of traffic with serious road safety implications. The results of these experiments highlight the usefulness of the UAVs technology, that combined with video processing technique allows the capture of real traffic conditions with a good level of accuracy.

Traffic Monitoring on City Roads Using UAVs

2019

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based systems are a suitable solution for monitoring, more particularly for traffic monitoring. The mobility, the low cost, and the broad view range of UAVs make them an attractive solution for traffic monitoring of city roads. UAVs are used to collect and send information about vehicles and unusual events to a traffic processing center, for traffic regulation. Existing UAVs based systems use only one UAV with a fixed trajectory. In this paper, we are using multiple cooperative UAVs to monitor the road traffic. This approach is based on adaptive UAVs trajectories, adjusted by moving points in UAVs fields of view. We introduced a learning phase to search for events locations with a frequent occurrence and to place UAVs above those locations. Our approach allows the detection of a lot of events and permits the reduction of UAVs energy consumption.

A Survey of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Trafficc Monitoring

2013

The focus of this paper is on surveying UAV-based systems for traffic monitoring and management. Although there has been voluminous research on the subject, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are proven to be a viable and less timeconsuming alternative to real-time traffic monitoring and management, providing the eye-in-the-sky solution to the problem.

An Operational System for Estimating Road Traffic Information from Aerial Images

Remote Sensing, 2014

Given that ground stationary infrastructures for traffic monitoring are barely able to handle everyday traffic volumes, there is a risk that they could fail altogether in situations arising from mass events or disasters. In this work, we present an alternative approach for traffic monitoring during disaster and mass events, which is based on an airborne optical sensor system. With this system, optical image sequences are automatically examined on board an aircraft to estimate road traffic information, such as vehicle positions, velocities and driving directions. The traffic information, estimated in real time on board, is immediately downlinked to a ground station. The airborne sensor system consists of a three-head camera system, a real-time-capable GPS/INS unit, five industrial PCs and a downlink unit. The processing chain for automatic extraction of traffic information contains modules for the synchronization of image and navigation data streams, orthorectification and vehicle detection and tracking modules. The vehicle detector is based on a combination of AdaBoost and support vector machine classifiers. Vehicle tracking relies on shape-based matching operators. The processing chain is evaluated on a large number of image sequences recorded during several campaigns, and the data quality is compared to that obtained from induction loops. In summary, we can conclude that the achieved overall quality of the traffic data extracted by the airborne system is in the range of 68% and 81%. Thus, it is comparable to data obtained from stationary ground sensor networks.

Survey of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Traffic Monitoring

Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 2014

In smart cities, vehicular applications require high computation capabilities and low-latency communication. Edge computing offers promising solutions for addressing these requirements because of several features, such as geo-distribution, mobility, low latency, heterogeneity, and support for real-time interactions. To employ network edges, existing fixed roadside units can be equipped with edge computing servers. Nevertheless, there are situations where additional infrastructure units are required to handle temporary high traffic loads during public events, unexpected weather conditions, or extreme traffic congestion. In such cases, the use of flying roadside units are carried by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which provide the required infrastructure for supporting traffic applications and improving the quality of service. UAVs can be dynamically deployed to act as mobile edges in accordance with traffic events and congestion conditions. The key benefits of this dynamic approach include: 1) the potential for characterizing the environmental requirements online and performing the deployment accordingly, and 2) the ability to move to another location when necessary. We propose a traffic-aware method for enabling the deployment of UAVs in vehicular environments. Simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve full network coverage under different scenarios without extra communication overhead or delay.

Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Traffic Surveys

LOGI – Scientific Journal on Transport and Logistics

The paper deals with the topic of monitoring traffic using unmanned aerial vehicles. The main research goal was to test the possibility of using aerial vehicles for traffic engineering applications, especially for determining the traffic intensity on roads and for evaluating the data on traffic using video footage. The practical part of the paper focuses on the evaluation of data on traffic obtained by means of unmanned aerial vehicle at a selected intersection of roads. The data are evaluated using SW based on work with neural networks. A stationary system composed of an unmanned aircraft, camera system with a stabiliser, ground source with voltage converter, wire unwinding system and accessories were created by the staff of the ITB for the purpose of video recording the traffic from a 20-meter height. Such a tethered unmanned aerial system enabled a long-term operation in the air and a video recording lasting 1 hour at least.

Comparison of Object Detection Algorithms Using Video and Thermal Images Collected from a UAS Platform: An Application of Drones in Traffic Management

ArXiv, 2021

There is a rapid growth of applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in traffic management, such as traffic surveillance, monitoring, and incident detection. However, the existing literature lacks solutions to real-time incident detection while addressing privacy issues in practice. This study explored real-time vehicle detection algorithms on both visual and infrared cameras and conducted experiments comparing their performance. Red Green Blue (RGB) videos and thermal images were collected from a UAS platform along highways in the Tampa, Florida, area. Experiments were designed to quantify the performance of a real-time background subtraction-based method in vehicle detection from a stationary camera on hovering UAVs under free-flow conditions. Several parameters were set in the experiments based on the geometry of the drone and sensor relative to the roadway. The results show that a background subtraction-based method can achieve good detection performance on RGB images (F1 ...

UAV Traffic Patrolling via Road Detection and Tracking in Anonymous Aerial Video Frames

Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 2019

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have gained great importance for patrolling, exploration, and surveillance. In this study, we have estimated a route UAV to follow, using aerial road images. In the experimental setup, for estimation, test, and validation stages, anonymous aerial road videos have been exploited, meaning a special image database was not produced for this simulation approach. In the proposed study, road portion is initially detected. Two methods are utilized to help road detection, which are k-Nearest Neighbor and Hough transformation. To form a decision loop, both results are matched. If they match each other, they are fused using spatial and spectral schemes for the comparison purpose. Once road area is detected, the road type classification is realized by Fuzzy approach. The resultant image is utilized to estimate route, over which the UAV have to fly towards that direction. In the simulation stage, an anonymous video stream previously captured by UAV is experimented to assess the performance of the underlying system for different roads. According to the implementation results, the proposed algorithm has succeeded in finding all the trial roads in the given aerial images, and the proportion of all the estimated road-portion to actual road pixels for all the images is averagely calculated as %95.40. Eventually, it is shown that UAV has followed the correct route, which is estimated by proposed approach, over the specified road using assigned video frames, and also performances of spatial and spectral fusion results are compared.