METRIC: Modelling and prediction of road traffic flow using drones

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also called drone, is now considered as one of the most promising techniques for intelligent transport systems (ITS). It has potential to be used as a technological platform for efficient and cost-effective data collection, traffic monitoring as well as for proactively solving problems of traffic incident and congestion.

This project has objectives to investigate and develop essential technology components for building a customisable pro-drone system that can be used for vehicle detection, traffic monitoring and data collection. A further objective of the project is to develop drone-based platform as a cyber-physical system for traffic information and management. Traffic data, collected by and abstracted from the drone-based system, will be a future data source for estimating and predicting traffic conditions on roads. The derived traffic information has potential to support the real-time decision makings in traffic control center e.g. Trafik Stockholm. 

In the first stage of the project, drone based perception and traffic monitoring technologies based on computer vision have been intensively investigated and developed, and results have been presented in publications including:

• X. Liang and X. Ma, "AVIATOR: fAst Visual perceptIon and Analytics for drone-based Traffic OpeRations," 2023 IEEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain, 2023
• Ning, M., Ma, X., Lu, Y., Calderara, S., Cucchiara, R. (2022). SeeFar: Vehicle Speed Estimation and Flow Analysis from a Moving UAV. In: Sclaroff, S., Distante, C., Leo, M., Farinella, G.M., Tombari, F. (eds) Image Analysis and Processing – ICIAP 2022. ICIAP 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13233. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06433-3_24

Meanwhile, drone based traffic surveillance will be used to digitalise road traffic system and support advanced traffic operations and incident management scenarios. This project develops essential technical components, and their integration aims to end up with a systematic solution based on cyber-physical system approaches. 

• X. Ma, X. Liang, M. Ning and A. Radu, "METRIC: Toward a Drone-based Cyber-Physical Traffic Management System," 2022 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Prague, Czech Republic, 2022, pp. 3324-3329, doi: 10.1109/SMC53654.2022.9945433.

Keywords: Drone Perception; Vehicle Detection; Traffic Monitoring; Computer Vision; Cyber-physical System; Digitalisation of Road Traffic.