Smart traffic light control system using image processing

Abstract

Traffic congestion has become a serious issue due to the growing number of vehicles in Malaysia. Traffic light control system is widely used to control the flow of road junction. Currently, most of the traffic light system used pre-time and count down timers to control traffic flow. Due to the fixed-time setting, often the system unable to handle unexpected heavy traffic flows and cause traffic jam. Thus, there is a need of adaptive traffic signals which are able to do real time monitoring to control traffic light signal based on traffic density. This study proposed an adaptive traffic light control system that uses image processing and image matching technique in controlling the traffic in an effective manner by taking images of each lane at a junction. The density of traffic in the images at each junction are compared. Results show that more time are allocated for the vehicles on the densest road to pass compared to other less dense road. Edge operation detector is used to detect the density of traffic at each lane. In this study, a comparison study was carried out by applying five different edge detectors namely Roberts, Sobel, Log, Canny and active contour. Among these detectors, Canny edge operation detector has found to be the best as it could extract actual edges with average time of 0.453 second.