J. Venkatraman

Bio: J. Venkatraman is an academic researcher from Indian Institutes of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Inductive sensor & Traffic flow. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 73 citations.

A Multiple Inductive Loop Vehicle Detection System for Heterogeneous and Lane-Less Traffic

Abstract: This paper presents a novel inductive loop sensor that can detect vehicles under a heterogeneous and less-lane-disciplined traffic and thus can be used to support a traffic control management system in optimizing the best use of existing roads. The loop sensor proposed in this paper detects large (e.g., bus) as well as small (e.g., bicycle) vehicles occupying any available space in the roadway, which is the main requirement for sensing heterogeneous and lane-less traffic. To accomplish the sensing of large as well as small vehicles, a multiple loop system with a new inductive loop sensor structure is proposed. The proposed sensor structure not only senses and segregates the vehicle type as bicycle, motor cycle, scooter, car, and bus but also enables accurate counting of the number of vehicles even in a mixed traffic flow condition. A prototype of the multiple loop sensing system has been developed and tested. Field tests indicate that the prototype successfully detected all types of vehicles and counted, correctly, the number of each type of vehicles. Thus, the suitability of the proposed sensor system for any type of traffic has been established.

Deep Multi-Scale Convolutional LSTM Network for Travel Demand and Origin-Destination Predictions

Abstract: Advancements in sensing and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies generate a huge amount of data. Mobility on demand (MoD) service benefits from the availability of big data in the intelligent transportation system. Given the future travel demand or origin–destination (OD) flows prediction, service providers can pre-allocate unoccupied vehicles to the customers’ origins of service to reduce waiting time. Traditional approaches on future travel demand and the OD flows predictions rely on statistical or machine learning methods. Inspired by deep learning techniques for image and video processing, through regarding localized travel demands as image pixels, a novel deep learning model called multi-scale convolutional long short-term memory network (MultiConvLSTM) is developed in this paper. Rather than using the traditional OD matrix which may lead to loss of geographical information, we propose a new data structure, called OD tensor to represent OD flows, and a manipulation method, called OD tensor permutation and matricization, is introduced to handle the high dimensionality features of OD tensor. MultiConvLSTM considers both temporal and spatial correlations to predict the future travel demand and OD flows. Experiments on real-world New York taxi data of around 400 million records are performed. Our results show that the MultiConvLSTM achieves the highest accuracy in both one-step and multiple-step predictions and it outperforms the existing methods for travel demand and OD flow predictions.

Cooperative Traffic Control With Green Wave Coordination for Multiple Intersections Based on the Internet of Vehicles

Abstract: Traffic congestion is a critical concern in most cities. Inefficient traffic control wastes time and fuel, and causes harmful carbon emissions, road accidents, and many economic problems. This paper proposes a cooperative traffic control framework for optimizing the global throughput and travel time for multiple intersections. Adjacent intersections are considered in analyzing their joint passing rates and attempting to maximize the number of vehicles traveling through a road network. The proposed framework provides fairness for each road segment and realizes the green wave concept for arterial roads. This paper extends previous studies by considering the passing rates of continuous road segments and coordinating traffic signals of multiple intersections. The simulation results show that the approach outperforms existing schemes in that it achieves a high global throughput, reduces the average waiting time, lowers the total travel time, and decreases average CO2 emissions. To verify the feasibility of the proposed framework, a wireless access in vehicular environments/dedicated short-range communications-based prototype for lane-level dynamic traffic control is designed and implemented.

Dynamic Traffic Control with Fairness and Throughput Optimization Using Vehicular Communications

Abstract: Traffic congestion in modern cities seriously affects our living quality and environments. Inefficient traffic management leads to fuel wastage in volume of billion gallons per year. In this paper, we propose a dynamic traffic control framework using vehicular communications and fine-grained information, such as turning intentions and lane positions of vehicles, to maximize traffic flows and provide fairness among traffic flows. With vehicular communications, the traffic controller at an intersection can collect all fine-grained information before vehicles pass the intersection. Our proposed signal scheduling algorithm considers the flows at all lanes, allocates more durations of green signs to those flows with higher passing rates, and also gives turns to those with lower passing rates for fairness provision. Simulation results show that the proposed framework outperforms existing works by significantly increasing the number of vehicles passing an intersection while keeping average waiting time low for vehicles on non-arterial roads. In addition, we discuss our implementation of an Zigbee-based prototype and experiences.

Improved Robust Vehicle Detection and Identification Based on Single Magnetic Sensor

Abstract: Vehicle detection and identification techniques have been widely applied in traffic scene to acquire traffic information depending on various sensors, such as video camera, induction loop, and magnetic sensor. The quantity and category of vehicles are the key components of the intelligent transportation systems as they provide original data for further analysis. Compared with the inductive loop and video camera, magnetic sensor can measure magnetic field distortion caused by the movement of vehicles. The precise amount and category of a vehicle can be obtained through reasonable data analysis. A novel vehicle detection algorithm is proposed based on the short-term variance sequence transformed from raw magnetic signal. The parking-sensitive module is introduced to enhance the robustness and adaptability of a detection method. With abundant signal data, 42-D features are extracted from every vehicle signal comprising statistical features of whole waveform and short-term features of fragment signal. The Gradient Tree Boosting algorithm is employed to identify four vehicle categories. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by the data collected at a freeway exit of Beijing. According to the experiential results based on 4507 vehicles, the vehicle detection algorithm proves to have 99.8% accurate rate and can be highly practical in site traffic environment. The 80.5% accuracy rate on vehicle identification approves the effectiveness of the proposed features on recognizing vehicles.

Intelligent traffic light controller using inductive loops for vehicle detection

Abstract: Through this paper we present the use of inductive loops as an instrument to measure traffic density. A microcontroller can be programmed to receive information about traffic density on different lanes, as measured by the inductive loops. Algorithms that not only ease congestion but also ensure the people in less congested lanes dont have to wait too long are discussed. Depending upon the traffic density a suitable algorithm can be executed to clear the congestion. A new design of inductive loop to suit our algorithm in case of multiple lane traffic has also been discussed here. Apart from causing delay, many times traffic congestion has resulted in loss of precious lives since help isnt able to reach the needy on time. In our proposed model we make use of radio transmitter-receiver to detect the presence of any ambulance/ fire brigade/ police vehicle and provide immediate right of way by traffic signal pre-emption. Lastly, there are many people who have a tendency of stopping way beyond the zebra crossing at a red signal. The use of infrared sensors to detect such vehicles and sound a buzzer to alert the traffic police has been presented. Overall, it is a complete model, one solution to many of traffic congestion related problems.