California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report presents the results of Phase 2 of a multi-year research effort on "Field Investigation of Advanced Vehicle Reidentification Techniques and Detector Technologies." Phase I of this research was conducted under PATH MOU 3008. Phases I and II of this research extended previous PATH research by the authors on MOU 336 "Section-Related Measures of Traffic System Performance: Prototype Field Implementation." Phase II of this research continued development, field investigation and assessment of the latest technologies available for traffic detection and surveillance, for collecting more accurate traffic characteristics and traffic data necessary for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. The focus of Phase II of this research was to utilize fully instrumented freeway and signalized intersection sites in the California Advanced Transportation Management Systems Testbed in Southern California for field investigation of several emerging traffic sensor and detector technologies for vehicle reidentification (REID) purposes and real-time traffic performance measurement. As part of this project, a traffic detector and surveillance sub-testbed (TDS 2) on North I-405 in Irvine became operational in August 2002, and the ability to perform REID-based real-time traffic performance measurement in TDS 2, developed as part of this research, and including section travel times, traffic origins and destinations, and vehicle classification, was demonstrated on-line at the PATH Annual Meeting in October 2002. The very encouraging results obtained to date by developing and applying a vehicle reidentification approach for real-time traffic performance measurement suggest that further development, implementation and testing of this approach would clearly be of value.