California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report presents the results of Phase I of a multi-year research effort on "Field Investigation of Advanced Vehicle Reidentification Techniques and Detector Technologies," and extends previous PATH research by the authors on MOU 336 "Section-Related Measures of Traffic System Performance: Prototype Field Implementation." The focus of this research included the following: significant expansion and enhancement of the ILD-based vehicle reidentification system at a major signalized intersection in Irvine, California to address reidentification of turning vehicles in addition to through vehicles; derivation of improved estimates of fundamental real-time traffic parameters such as speed, volume and vehicle class from single loop detector inductive signatures; development of a new technique for on-line real-time intersection level of service estimation; implementation of a capability for communicating real-time traffic performance data to operators in the City of Irvine Transportation Management Center (TMC); development of a prototype real-time web-site for internet-based access to performance data from the study intersection in Irvine (and other sites in the future); initial testing of a new state-of-the-art detector card (the IST-222, from IST, Inc.); and an initial study of video image processing for future detector data fusion of video and loop signature data. The very encouraging results obtained to date for signalized intersection application of the vehicle reidentification approach suggest that further development and improvement of the vehicle reidentification algorithms for this application would clearly be of value. Keywords vehicle signature, inductive loop detector, single loop speed estimation, vehicle classification, vehicle reidentification, signalized intersection, level of service, detector card, data fusion, web-site