Monitoring road traffic with a UAV-based system

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an attractive solution for road traffic monitoring because of their mobility, low cost, and broad view range. Up to now, existing traffic monitoring systems based on UAVs only use one UAV with fixed trajectory to extract information about vehicles. In this paper, we propose a road traffic monitoring system using multiple UAVs. We develop a method to generate adaptive UAVs trajectories, which is based on the tracking of moving points in the UAV field of view. Also we generate UAVs trajectories using mobility models that are usually used to model vehicles mobility. UAVs monitor the traffic on a city road, they are responsible for collecting and sending, in real time, vehicle information to a traffic processing center for traffic regulation purposes. We show that the performance of our system is better than the performance of the fixed UAV trajectory traffic monitoring system in terms of coverage rates and events detection rates.