Low cost in-flow traffic monitor for South-East Asia

Safety and congestion are two factors which have driven developed countries to adopt Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Such systems cannot be successfully applied to South East Asian countries like Vietnam due to the extremely complicated traffic patterns and lack of infrastructure. Firstly, motorcycles rather than passenger vehicles are by far the dominant vehicles for South East Asian countries. Moreover, road quality dramatically changes from one place to another. These factors lead to many traffic problems such as congestion and accidents. The purpose of this research is to implement a mobile system to monitor the traffic conditions which is applicable for deployment on Vietnamese roads. The system contains a set of sensors including a temperature sensor, humidity sensor, GPS receiver and two catadioptric cameras which are all mounted to a motorcycle. The two catadioptric cameras capture an overlapping 360° street view that observes the surrounding environment. The spherical camera images are flattened using an unconventional inverse mapping technique to preserve panoramic size without introducing blank pixel regions (as would be present for traditional Log-Polar to Cartesian mapping). All information captured from sensors and video will be used to identify hazards and to model the road users in Vietnam. This data is envisioned to facilitate studies of rider interactions to enhance driver awareness through education and road planning to improve road safety.