Intelligent Traffic Monitoring Systems

Abstract

Traffic management is gaining increasing importance in solving the major problem of traffic congestion present in many countries. Traditional techniques of RADAR, LIDAR and LASAR to address this problem are no longer an efficient solution, as they are time-consuming and expensive. In this modern age of growing technology and population, challenges are being over-come with several new ways to make the traffic system smarter, more reliable and robust, considering the overall interaction of all the traffic components: vehicles, drivers and pedestrians. These systems are largely supported on Intelligent Traffic System (ITS), and their applications are mostly dedicated to traffic monitoring based on video processing, vehicle detection and tracking. Intelligent surveillance systems may also employ computer vision and pattern recognition techniques. This chapter addresses these new solutions that are being used for traffic management, their advantages and disadvantages, the challenges of their implementation, and most important, the ability to support traffic management systems in their pursue of solving critical problems of congested transportation networks.