Abstract
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.
Highlights
Everyday operations for generating road traffic information mainly rely on stationary ground infrastructure, such as induction loops, radar sensors and traffic cameras
For the evaluation of the vehicle detection and tracking algorithms, the values for correctness, completeness and quality are calculated for different scenes from several campaigns
We propose a solution for automatic extraction of traffic information from airborne images, which satisfies the increasing demand for accurate and actual traffic data
Summary
There, measures are adopted for the optimization of traffic flow These are transferred to the roads via intelligent traffic guidance systems. It was shown that these systems are well suited for the estimation of travel times, even without the use of stationary traffic sensors. These data are incomplete in terms of wide area coverage and are not sensitive to short-term congestion. In the case of disasters, with the damage of ground infrastructure or extensive power blackouts, such systems would fail. This would result in a complete lack of information and not just with respect to side roads
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