VEHICLE DENSITY ESTIMATION IN QUEZON CITY USING OBJECT-BASED FEATURE EXTRACTION ON SATELLITE IMAGES

Manual vehicle counting is often tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. While automatic counting from CCTV allows for annual average daily traffic estimation, CCTV files in the Philippines are not available to the public and do not fully cover all road extents. In this study, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques are employed to use readily available satellite images to obtain vehicle count in selected road segments in the Central Business Districts of Quezon City before and after the COVID-19 lockdown. Using the existing Google Earth Images, a segmentation algorithm using ENVI Feature Classification was developed to allow remote counting of vehicles from the earliest image in 2018. The devised algorithm was able to delineate, identify, and classify according to the types of vehicles that are visible on the image. An average error rate of 12.24% was found by comparison of automated counts and manual counts on the images, while a regression analysis yielded a value of R2 = 0.9227 that denoted a strong relationship between automated and manual counts. Vehicle density was calculated, and percent differences were obtained to determine the relative differences of the vehicle counts from the vehicle count of the earliest image taken in 2018. It was found that the vehicle density declined by at least 81% by March 25, 2020. The methodological framework presented in this study provides estimates of vehicle counts and vehicle density. It can be further improved if vehicle counts, on the same location and period, from field validation surveys are available.