Visual Counting of Traffic Flow from a Car via Vehicle Detection and Motion Analysis

Visual traffic counting so far has been carried out by static cameras at streets or aerial pictures from sky. This work initiates a new approach to count traffic flow by using populated vehicle driving recorders. Mainly vehicles are counted by a camera moves along a route on opposite lane. Vehicle detection is first implemented in video frames by using deep learning YOLO3, and then vehicle trajectories are counted in the spatial-temporal space called motion profile. Motion continuity, direction, and detection missing are considered to avoid multiple counting of oncoming vehicles. This method has been tested on naturalistic driving videos lasting for hours. The counted vehicle numbers can be interpolated as a flow of opposite lanes from a patrol vehicle for traffic control. The mobile counting of traffic is more flexible than the traffic monitoring by cameras at street corners

Predicting Hazardous Driving Events Using Multi-Modal Deep Learning Based on Video Motion Profile and Kinematics Data

As the raising of traffic accidents caused by commercial vehicle drivers, more regulations have been issued for improving their safety status. Driving record instruments are required to be installed on such vehicles in China. The obtained naturalistic driving data offer insight into the causal factors of hazardous events with the requirements to identify where hazardous events happen within large volumes of data. In this study, we develop a model based on a low-definition driving record instrument and the vehicle kinematic data for post-accident analysis by multi-modal deep learning method. With a higher camera position on commercial vehicles than cars that can observe further distance, motion profiles are extracted from driving video to capture the trajectory features of front vehicles at different depths. Then random forest is used to select significant kinematic variables which can reflect the potential crash. Finally, a multi-modal deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) combined both video and kinematic data is developed to identify potential collision risk in each 12-second vehicle trip. The analysis results indicate that the proposed multi-modal deep learning model can identify hazardous events within a large volumes of data at an AUC of 0.81, which outperforms the state-of-the-art random forest model and kinematic threshold method

Application of big data in transportation safety analysis using statistical and deep learning methods

The emergence of new sensors and data sources provides large scale high-resolution big data from instantaneous vehicular movements, driver decision and states, surrounding environment, roadway characteristics, weather condition, etc. Such a big data can be served to expand our understanding regarding the current state of the transportation and help us to proactively evaluate and monitor the system performance. The key idea behind this dissertation is to identify the moments and locations where drivers are exhibiting different behavior comparing to the normal behavior. The concept of driving volatility is utilized which quantifies deviation from normal driving in terms of variations in speed, acceleration/deceleration, and vehicular jerk. This idea is utilized to explore the association of volatility in different hierarchies of transportation system, i.e.: 1) Instance level; 2) Event level; 3) Driver level; 4) Intersection level; and 5) Network level. In summary, the main contribution of this dissertation is exploring the association of variations in driving behavior in terms of driving volatility at different levels by harnessing big data generated from emerging data sources under real-world condition, which is applicable to the intelligent transportation systems and smart cities. By analyzing real-world crashes/near-crashes and predicting occurrence of extreme event, proactive warnings and feedback can be generated to warn drivers and adjacent vehicles regarding potential hazard. Furthermore, the results of this study help agencies to proactively monitor and evaluate safety performance of the network and identify locations where crashes are waiting to happen. The main objective of this dissertation is to integrate big data generated from emerging sources into safety analysis by considering different levels in the system. To this end, several data sources including Connected Vehicles data (with more than 2.2 billion seconds of observations), naturalistic driving data (with more than 2 million seconds of observations from vehicular kinematics and driver behavior), conventional data on roadway factors and crash data are integrated