Traffic monitoring using image processing : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information and Telecommunications Engineering at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Traffic monitoring involves the collection of data describing the characteristics of vehicles and their movements. Such data may be used for automatic tolls, congestion and incident detection, law enforcement, and road capacity planning etc. With the recent advances in Computer Vision technology, videos can be analysed automatically and relevant information can be extracted for particular applications. Automatic surveillance using video cameras with image processing technique is becoming a powerful and useful technology for traffic monitoring. In this research project, a video image processing system that has the potential to be developed for real-time application is developed for traffic monitoring including vehicle tracking, counting, and classification. A heuristic approach is applied in developing this system. The system is divided into several parts, and several different functional components have been built and tested using some traffic video sequences. Evaluations are carried out to show that this system is robust and can be developed towards real-time applications

An AI-Horticulture Monitoring and Prediction System with Automatic Object Counting

Estimating density maps and counting the number of objects of interest from images has a wide range of applications, such as crowd counting, traffic monitoring, cell microscopy in biomedical imaging, plant counting in agronomy, as well as environmental survey. Manual counting is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Over the past few years, the topic of automatic object counting by computers has been actively evolving from the classic machine learning methods based on handcrafted image features to end-to-end deep learning methods using data-driven feature engineering, for example by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In our research, we focus on the task of counting plants for large-scale nursery farms to build an AI-horticulture monitoring and prediction system using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. The common challenges of automatic object counting as other computer vision tasks are scenario difference, object occlusion, scale variation of views, non-uniform distribution, and perspective difference. For an AI-horticulture monitoring and prediction system for large-scale analysis, the plant species various a lot, so that the image features are different based on different appearance of species. In order to solve these complex problems, the deep convolutional neural network-based approaches are proposed. Our method uses the density map as the ground truth to train the modified classic deep neural networks for object counting regression. Experiments are conducted comparing our proposed models with the state-of-the-art object counting and density estimation approaches. The results demonstrate that our proposed counting model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving the best counting performance with a mean absolute error of 1.93 and a mean square error of 2.68 on our horticulture nursery plant dataset

Measuring Impacts of New Highways Capacity – A Discussion of Potential Survey Methods

The paper reviews survey methods that might be used to detect the various impacts of new highway capacity (changes in flow and network travel times; behavioural responses such as rerouting, change in departure times, change of mode, redistribution and change in trip frequency; and changes in land use). The review was conducted in the context of a study for TRRL which sought to establish the feasibility of measuring responses to new highway capacity. The paper considers, in turn, surveys of traffic flow, public transport usage and network travel times, methods of estimating origin-destination matrices and a variety of questionnaire and interview techniques which might be used to collect individual travel data (roadside interviews; stopline surveys; household interviews; trip-end interviews; self completion questionnaires; retrospective, prospective and stated preference questions; panel surveys and indepth interviews). There is also a brief discussion of methods to determine bight movements and land use effects. The paper should not be regarded as a source of detailed information about the various types of survey but rather as a review of their comparative strengths and weaknesses in the given context

Fiber-optic interferometric sensor for monitoring automobile and rail traffic

This article describes a fiber-optic interferometric sensor and measuring scheme including input-output components for traffic density monitoring. The proposed measuring system is based on the interference in optical fibers. The sensor, based on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, is constructed to detect vibration and acoustic responses caused by vehicles moving around the sensor. The presented solution is based on the use of single-mode optical fibers (G.652.D and G.653) with wavelength of 1550 nm and laser source with output power of 1 mW. The benefit of this solution lies in electromagnetic interference immunity and simple implementation because the sensor does not need to be installed destructively into the roadway and railroad tracks. The measuring system was tested in real traffic and is characterized by detection success of 99.27% in the case of automotive traffic and 100% in the case of rail traffic.Web of Science2662995298