Development of a tracking-based system for automated traffic data collection for roundabouts

Traffic data collection is essential for performance assessment, safety improvement and road planning. While automated traffic data collection for highways is relatively mature, that for roundabouts is more challenging due to more complex traffic scenes, data specifications and vehicle behavior. In this paper, the authors propose an automated traffic data collection system dedicated to roundabout scenes. The proposed system has mainly four steps of processing. First, camera calibration is performed for roundabout traffic scenes with a novel circle-based calibration algorithm. Second, the system uses enhanced Mixture of Gaussian algorithm with shaking removal for video segmentation, which can tolerate repeated camera displacements and background movements. Then, Kalman filtering, Kernel-based tracking and overlap-based optimization are employed to track vehicles while they are occluded and to derive the complete vehicle trajectories. The resulting vehicle trajectory of each individual vehicle gives the position, size, shape and speed of the vehicle at each time moment. Finally, a data mining algorithm is used to automatically extract the interested traffic data from the vehicle trajectories. The overall traffic data collection system has been implemented in software and runs on regular PC. The total processing time for a 3-hour video is currently 6 h. The automated traffic data collection system can significantly reduce cost and improve efficiency compared to manual data collection. The extracted traffic data have been compared to accurate manual measurements for 29 videos recorded on 29 different days, and an accuracy of more than 90% has been achieved. © 2017, The Author(s).