Analysis and experiments of vehicle detection with magnetic sensors in urban environments

Along with the development of industry, the number of vehicles is growing very fast. Then, the traffic situation will be complicated. In order to alleviate the traffic pressure and decrease the traffic congestion, the study of vehicle detection becomes very important and very necessary. The traditional vehicle detection method, which is named inductive loop method, costs a lot and has a high impact on traffic flow. Therefore, this paper studies the vehicle detection by using the wireless sensor network. The vehicle is sensed by magnetic sensors, and the signal is transmitted by wireless communication way. Due to the deployment of magnetic sensors on the side of roads, it is very difficult to sense and receive very accurate magnetic signal. After receiving the magnetic signal, the wavelets methods are used to filter the noise and improve the accuracy of magnetic signal. In addition, two kinds of algorithms are designed to determine the traffic flow based on the magnetic signal. According to the experimental results, the accuracy of each algorithm is 90.9 %and 84.1%, respectively.