Efficient Roundabout Supervision: Real-Time Vehicle Detection and Tracking on Nvidia Jetson Nano

Abstract

In recent years, a significant number of people in Morocco have been commuting daily to Casablanca, the country’s economic capital. This heavy traffic flow has led to congestion and accidents during certain times of the day as the city’s roads cannot handle the high volume of vehicles passing through. To address this issue, it is essential to expand the infrastructure based on accurate traffic-flow data. In collaboration with the municipality of Bouskoura, a neighboring city of Casablanca, we proposed installing a smart camera on the primary route connecting the two cities. This camera would enable us to gather accurate statistics on the number and types of vehicles crossing the road, which can be used to adapt and redesign the existing infrastructure. We implemented our system using the YOLOv7-tiny object detection model to detect and classify the various types of vehicles (such as trucks, cars, motorcycles, and buses) crossing the main road. Additionally, we used the Deep SORT tracking method to track each vehicle appearing on the camera and to provide the total number of each class for each lane, as well as the number of vehicles passing from one lane to another. Furthermore, we deployed our solution on an embedded system, specifically the Nvidia Jetson Nano. This allowed us to create a compact and efficient system that is capable of a real-time processing of camera images, making it suitable for deployment in various scenarios where limited resources are required. Deploying our solution on the Nvidia Jetson Nano showed promising results, and we believe that this approach could be applied in similar traffic-surveillance projects to provide accurate and reliable data for better decision-making.