Intelligent extended floating car data collection

The elaboration of data collected by vehicles moving on road network is relevant for traffic management and for private service providers, which can bundle updated traffic information with navigation services. Floating data, in its extended acceptation, contains not only time and location provided by a positioning system, but also information coming from various vehicle sensors. In this paper we describe our extended data collection system, in which vehicles are able to collect data about their local environment, namely the presence of roadworks and traffic slowdowns, by analyzing visual data taken by a looking forward camera and data from the on-board Electronic Control Unit. Upon detection of such events, a packet is set up containing time, position, vehicle data, results of on-board elaboration, one or more images of the road ahead and an estimation of the local traffic level. Otherwise, the transmitted packet containing only the minimal data, making its size adaptive to the environment surrounding the vehicle. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.