A Vibration-Based Traffic Monitoring System Using Distributed Optical Sensing Technology

Abstract

Abstract Effective traffic management requires use of monitoring technologies to extract traffic parameters that describe the characteristics of vehicles. This article presents a vibration-based traffic monitoring system to detect traffic parameters comprehensively, including the three major desired characteristics of vehicles: position, speed, and category. Using distributed optical technology, this system can monitor traffic parameters on a large scale. Firstly, distributed optical fiber was embedded into pavement as a series of vibration sensors to collect pavement vibration information. Then, a signal processing method, based on wavelet transform and short-time energy, was applied to reconstruct vibration signals for vibration features extraction. Estimation methods of traffic parameters were proposed based on the vibration characteristics in time, space and frequency domain. To evaluate the performance of this traffic monitoring system, a prototype system was installed on a highway in Shanghai, China. This system shows good accuracy in position locating (± 14.639 cm), category classification (86.98 %), and speed estimation (± 3.046 km/h). Meanwhile, results indicate this system provides a better monitoring performance at high speed.