Traffic state monitoring by close coupling logic with OBU and cloud applications

Traffic state monitoring is important for improving and maintaining smooth traffic. Various factors that affect traffic can be considered as states. These factors to be detected can be not only conventional traffic congestion but also the volume of pedestrians at stops or pedestrian flooding into roads and blocking vehicles’ paths and bicycles weaving through traffic. The conventional approach to sensing is to deploy roadside units such as loop coil, sonic sensor, or camera sensor. The new approach is based on a vehicle probe system gathering mainly location and speed data. However, a more sophisticated approach is an image-recognition-based probe system. This approach can directly sense traffic states. Various sensing targets can be detected by developing image-processing logic specific to targets in collaboration with cloud applications. In short, the image-recognition-based onboard unit’s (OBU’s) probe system has flexibility for further possibilities.