A Measurement of Traffic Vehicles Flow by the Ultrasonic Spatial Filtering Method

교통난 계측 I-초음파용 공간필터법에 의하여-

For the smooth flow of traffic vehicles and its effective management, it is necessary to have an exact information on traffic condition, i.e., the volume of traffic, velocity, occupancy and classification of vehicles. In particular, for classification of vehicles, there has been only image processing method using camera, where the method can obtain much information but rather expensive. In this paper, an algorithm for the measurement of velocity and total length of vehicles has been proposed to develop a general traffic management system, which is necessary to discriminate the class of vehicles. In order to realize the proposed algorithm, we have developed an ultrasonic spatial filtering method, which has better performance than that of using the traditional vehicle detector. To have this system to be constructed, we have introduced three sets of ultrasonic devices where each has one transmitter and two receivers which are arranged to obtain the spatial difference of objects. The velocity of vehicles can be measured by analyzing the occurrence time of pulses and their time differences. The total length of vehicles can be given by multiplying velocity with time interval of pulses sequence. To confirm the effectiveness of this measuring system, the experiment by the spatial filtering method using the ultrasonic sensors has been carried out. As the results, it is found that the proposed method can be used as one of measurement tools in the general traffic management system.