A video streaming application for urban traffic management

Abstract

Urban traffic control systems have based their technological infrastructure both on advanced analog close-circuit television systems (CCTV) and point-to-point links, providing difficult-to-scale and very expensive systems. The main goal of an urban traffic monitoring system is to capture, send, play and distribute video information from the streets of a certain city to a management centre where it is processed by different services. Current digitalization process of video networks, and the research carried out in the field of streaming media, has led vendors to present proprietary hardware and software solutions resulting in a strong dependency by their customers. This work presents an open urban traffic control system based in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) philosophy for hardware and software components, as well as open source and standardized protocols. The existence of open standards for video encoding and protocols for streaming media transmission over IP networks has led to the proposal of such a system. The proposed system is a suitable solution in terms of scalability, cost, interoperability and performance for traffic control systems. Furthermore, its architecture can be easily adapted to other video applications and tools like command and control, surveillance or security systems for military and civilian applications.