Evaluation of small unmanned aerial system highway volume and speed-sensing applications

Abstract

Small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) have been utilised in the transportation industry in recent years to decrease the cost of projects and tasks while increasing safety. This is due to their ability to capture aerial images with reduced effort and time. Recently, these devices have begun to be used for traffic monitoring, given their ability to capture video above a roadway. Combined with object-tracking techniques, vehicle data such as speeds, volumes, and trajectories could be extracted, providing an opportunity to revolutionize traffic data collection techniques. There exists a need to improve upon origin–destination volume and speed data collection procedures through the development of a low-cost methodology to capture detailed data that would allow for more accurate analysis. This study evaluates a methodology and measures the accuracy of volume and speed data collected through sUAS aerial imagery using object tracking techniques. Using the developed methodology, vehicle volumes were tracked at 93% accuracy, and vehicle speeds were recorded with a 6.6% relative error. While future improvements could be made on this methodology as technology advances, this study reveals a low-cost solution to collect vehicle data which could improve the efficiency of transportation studies, and in turn, improve safety.