Detection of Traffic Congestion in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery

A new approach for the traffic congestion detection in time series of optical digital camera images is proposed. It is well suited to derive various traffic parameters such as vehicle density, average vehicle velocity, beginning and end of congestion, length of congestion or for other traffic monitoring applications. The method is based on the vehicle detection on the road segment by change detection between two images with a short time lag, the usage of a priori information such as road data base, vehicle sizes and road parameters and a simple linear traffic model based on the spacing between vehicles. The estimated velocity profiles for experimental data acquired by airborne optical remote sensing sensor - 3 K camera system - coincide quite well with the reference measurements.