Vehicular traffic monitoring with mobile devices

We present a novel method where smart phone sensors are used to sense the prevailing traffic situation and to share extracted information among a community. Instead of using the power-hungry GPS receiver in the mobile device for detecting congestion through vehicular motion, we use the accelerometer along with a novel algorithm. We show that traffic congestion situations can be identified with 78% accuracy with our technique. Vehicular traffic has become a severe problem, particularly in the less developed countries. Therefore pre awareness of congestion situations is very important for an efficient lifestyle.