Ubiquitous and Low Power Vehicles Speed Monitoring for Intelligent Transport Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a high scalability real-time intelligent traffic monitoring system, based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The main features of this system are low cost, low power consumption, traffic monitoring, and connectivity. The system’s architecture includes an RFID reader, a passive tag, and a Raspberry Pi. Our solution collects vehicle information from the labels and stores the data into a database by employing only one antenna. The main challenge is that the RFID module is not robust enough to recognize the information in the vehicle’s RFID tag on each information query, while the label is in the reading zone. This instability does not allow us to know precisely when and where a vehicle enters or leaves the sensing zone. What is more, the high random error in the power signal and the complexity of its characteristic curve pattern add difficulty to the speed calculation, when we reduce the number of antennas to one. For this reason, an innovative approach has been designed, using customized modular neural network (MNN). This method fits the collected data (power signal vs time) affected by acute random noise, to the characteristic correspondence function among the signal power and the position of the terminal, which domains are dimensionally different. As a result, we can estimate the vehicle speeds and obtain the whole vehicle information. Under this novel method, we are able to reduce the hardware, in comparison with previous approaches, making it cheaper and decreasing power consumption.