A Technological Platform for Traffic Information Collection and Integration

Effective traffic information services are of great importance to both individual vehicles and the traffic control and management organizations. Currently most existing traffic information centres as well as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) rely on single source of traffic data, eg GPS-enabled vehicle location/speed, monitoring video images, coil-detected speed, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V)-based traffic conditions, among others. Each of these sources has it on advantages and limitations. Solely Relying on any of them either can not provide accurate traffic information services at a reasonable cost and a lot of other traffic information is wasted. In this regard, this project aims to investigate and develop the key technologies for a platform for traffic information collection and integration. The research and development of project focuses on the platform structure, the interface specifications for data flow access, a unified encoding method of traffic flow data, the rapid identification of monitoring video image – based traffic conditions, and the fusion of multi-source traffic flow data. The platform will effectively enable the collection, integration and exchange of multi-sourced traffic information with different data formats. It will also support various applications of dynamic traffic information services and vehicle safety, which is of great benefit to the society.