Modeling of Real Time Traffic Flow Monitoring System Using Deep Learning and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Recently, intelligent video surveillance technologies using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been considerably increased in the transportation sector. Real time collection of traffic videos by the use of UAVs finds useful to monitor the traffic flow and road conditions. Since traffic jams have become common in urban areas, it is needed to design artificial intelligence (AI) based recognition techniques to attain effective traffic flow monitoring. Besides, the traffic flow monitoring system can assist the traffic managers to start efficient dispersal actions. Therefore, this study designs a real time traffic flow monitoring system using deep learning (DL) and UAVs, called RTTFM-DL. The proposed RTTFM-DL technique aims to detect vehicles, count vehicles, estimate speed and determine traffic flow. In addition, an efficient vehicle detection model is proposed by the use of Faster Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Faster RCNN) with Residual Network (ResNet). Also, a detection line based vehicle counting approach is designed, which is based on overlap ratio. Finally, traffic flow monitoring takes place based on the estimated vehicle count and vehicle speed. In order to guarantee the effectual performance of the RTTFM-DL technique, a series of experimental analyses take place and the results are examined under varying aspects. The experimental outcomes highlighted the betterment of the RTTFM-DL technique over the recent techniques. The RTTFM-DL technique has gained improved outcomes with a higher accuracy of 0.975.