Title
Real-Time Bidirectional Traffic Flow Parameter Estimation From Aerial Videos.
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity in traffic monitoring due to their low cost, high flexibility, and wide view range. Traffic flow parameters such as speed, density, and volume extracted from UAV-based traffic videos are critical for traffic state estimation and traffic control and have recently received much attention from researchers. However, different from stationary surveillance videos, the camera platforms move with UAVs, and the background motion in aerial videos makes it very challenging to process for data extraction. To address this problem, a novel framework for real-time traffic flow parameter estimation from aerial videos is proposed. The proposed system identifies the directions of traffic streams and extracts traffic flow parameters of each traffic stream separately. Our method incorporates four steps that make use of the Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi (KLT) tracker, k-means clustering, connected graphs, and traffic flow theory. The KLT tracker and k-means clustering are used for interest-point-based motion analysis; then, four constraints are proposed to further determine the connectivity of interest points belonging to one traffic stream cluster. Finally, the average speed of a traffic stream as well as density and volume can be estimated using outputs from previous steps and reference markings. Our method was tested on five videos taken in very different scenarios. The experimental results show that in our case studies, the proposed method achieves about 96% and 87% accuracy in estimating average traffic stream speed and vehicle count, respectively. The method also achieves a fast processing speed that enables real-time traffic information estimation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/TITS.2016.2595526
IEEE Trans. Intelligent Transportation Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Videos,Unmanned aerial vehicles,Roads,Real-time systems,Tracking,Parameter estimation
Computer vision,Traffic generation model,Data collection,Traffic flow,Bidirectional traffic,Simulation,Floating car data,Artificial intelligence,Estimation theory,Engineering,Motion analysis,Cluster analysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
4
1524-9050
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.70
21
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ke Ruimin1896.69
zhibin li2292.92
Sung Kim3727.41
john ash4151.04
zhiyong cui5593.61
Yinhai Wang629239.37