Estimating Link Travel Time with a Video Image Tracking System

摘要

A new technology for measuring travel time that combines many of the advantagesof other systems and eliminates their disadvantages was tested and evaluated by researchers at the University of Washington. This new technology is a video image detection system based on vehicle tracking, called Mobilizer. This system offers the promise of being able to track individual vehicles passively along any route monitored by video cameras. This system also provides all of the standard traffic measures reported by previous generation point processing video image systems, but is also capable of reporting link travel times, which cannot be measured by the point processing systems. This report presents the results of the efforts to establish valid data collection equipment and methods for the Mobilizer system and the preliminary performance results of the Mobilizer system based on studies performed at local roadway segments within the Puget Sound region. These preliminary results indicated that the Mobilizer was capable of matching vehicles in successive fields-of-view with a high degree of accuracy and that the travel time estimates provided by the system were found to be statistically valid and accurate.