Real-time urban traffic information estimation with a limited number of surveillance cameras

Constant traffic congestion consumes enormous amounts of energy and causes vastly increased journey times. Therefore, real-time traffic information is of great importance to the public because such information is invaluable to more efficient traffic control and travel planning. To obtain such information in metropolises like Shanghai, however, is very challenging due to the extraordinarily large scale and com- plexity of the underlying road network. In this paper, we pro- pose a novel traffic estimation scheme utilizing surveillance cameras pervasively deployed in cities. With only a limited number of roads with cameras, we adopt a measurement- based traffic matrix （TM） estimation method to infer the traf- fic conditions on those roads with no cameras. Extensively trace-driven simulations as well as field study results show that our scheme can achieve high accuracy with a very limited number of measurements. The accuracy of our measurement- based algorithm outperforms the traditional speed-based and model-based approaches by up to 50%.