Semiautomated Tool for Extraction of Microlevel Traffic Data from Videographic Survey

Abstract

Real-world traffic data collection, extraction, and analysis at a microscopic level is necessary for modeling various traffic and transportation phenomena. In developing countries such as India, where the traffic is characterized by different vehicle types and non-lane-based vehicle movement, an effective tool for vehicle data extraction and analysis is necessary. Development of a fully automated software tool for vehicle trajectory extraction is practically impossible because of the weak lane-based movement of vehicles and occlusion. For addressing these issues, a semiautomated tool, a traffic data extractor, was developed to extract the details of vehicle movements with good accuracy (0.1 s). A videographic survey followed by a camera calibration technique was used to obtain the real-world coordinates from two-dimensional image coordinates. The concept of a vanishing point–based camera calibration technique was used in this tool. The steps involved in handling the developed tool and its applications in microscopic traffic data extraction and analysis are presented.