Sidewalk Gaseous Pollutants Estimation Through UAV Video-based Model

As unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology grew in popularity over the years, it was introduced for air quality monitoring. This can easily be used to estimate the sidewalk emission concentration by calculating road traffic emission factors of different vehicle types. These calculations require a simulation of the spread of pollutants from one or more sources given for estimation. For this purpose, a Gaussian plume dispersion model was developed based on the US EPA Motor Vehicle Emissions Simulator (MOVES), which provides an accurate estimate of fuel consumption and pollutant emissions from vehicles under a wide range of user-defined conditions. This paper describes a methodology for estimating emission concentration on the sidewalk emitted by different types of vehicles. This line source considers vehicle parameters, wind speed and direction, and pollutant concentration using a UAV equipped with a monocular camera. All were sampled over an hourly interval. In this article, the YOLOv5 deep learning model is developed, vehicle tracking is used through Deep SORT (Simple Online and Realtime Tracking), vehicle localization using a homography transformation matrix to locate each vehicle and calculate the parameters of speed and acceleration, and ultimately a Gaussian plume dispersion model was developed to estimate the CO, NOx concentrations at a sidewalk point. The results demonstrate that these estimated pollutants values are good to give a fast and reasonable indication for any near road receptor point using a cheap UAV without installing air monitoring stations along the road.