A visibility monitoring system utilizing roadside video camera facilities for highway systems

With regard to the desperate demands of visibility monitoring, alarm and disposal in China highway, a visibility monitoring system was approached, by utilizing densely-deployed video camera facilities distributing along highway roadside. This system is composed mainly by multiple roadside lower end subsystems and a data service upper end subsystem deployed in information center of China highway network. The former subsystems are implemented by wrapping roadside video camera facilities, and have a plugin-based software structure for diversity, customizability requirements of data collections. The latter subsystem is built on J2EE platform, providing basic services as data transmission, data fusion, monitoring and alert, and data publish/subscribe mechanism, therefore can be easily integrated with other ITS systems through data sharing bus. Application results on demonstration system show that, this system has an acceptable visibility detection precision, and meets the requirements of comprehensive highway visibility monitoring and real-time low visibility warning, therefore it's well applicable in operation management and efficiency, safety improvement works of highway systems.