Evaluation of Sensors in Modern Smartphones for Vehicular Traffic Monitoring

In recent years, traffic density in the European Union has continuously increased. In the same period, the road network could not be extended to meet the growing traffic demand. A consequence is a lot of congestion on European roads, causing huge economical as well as ecological damage. These circumstances make it absolutely necessary to bring an improvement to this situation. A first step towards a much more efficient usage of the existing road network is to collect floating car data to describe the actual traffic situation in realtime. Today more and more smartphones are equipped with with all the necessary sensors (e.g. GPS, Accelerometer, Gyroscope). Such devices can be used to collect and distribute relevant traffic metrics that are crucial for applications such as smart vehicle guidance. This work describes how sensor data from Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) can be retrieved, corrected and fused to get an accurate picture of real world traffic phenomena. Index Terms Kalman Filter, Smartphones, Microelectromechanical Systems, Vehicular Traffic