Enhancing traffic control systems with live video analytics: Issues, challenges, opportunities, and recent problems

Abstract

With the rapid urbanization and increasing number of vehicles on the roads, it has become imperative to develop innovative solutions that can monitor and manage traffic congestion automatically. Traffic congestion harms the economy, environment, and overall quality of life. To address these challenges, smart traffic management systems employ cutting-edge technologies such as live video analytics and sensor-based adaptive traffic control systems. These systems can predict traffic patterns, locate congestion hotspots, and uncover abnormalities contributing to road accidents in real time. However, adopting these technologies for traffic control systems raises important concerns such as robustness and sustainability across different traffic junctions, data integration from multiple sources, and computational feasibility for real time computation. Therefore, this paper aims to present an overview of the potential benefits and challenges in adapting the latest technologies including the Internet of things and machine learning for sustainable traffic management. Additionally, a case study of a smart city is presented to evaluate an adaptive traffic control system based on live camera feed analytics by leveraging computer vision techniques. The adaptive traffic control system is accurate in vehicle detection and counting. This system is very useful for smart cities where traffic signals need to be automated according to the density of vehicles.