Vehicle Counting with an Embedded Traffic Data System using an Optical Transient Sensor

In this paper a sensor system for traffic data acquisition is presented. The embedded system, comprising a motion-sensitive optical sensor and a low-cost, low-power DSP, is capable of detecting, counting and measuring the velocity of passing vehicles. The detection is based on monitoring of the optical sensor output within configurable regions of interest in the sensor's field-of-view. In particular in this work we focus on the evaluation of the applied vehicle counting algorithm. The verification of the acquired data is based on manually annotated traffic data of 360 minutes length, containing a total of about 7000 vehicles. The counting error is determined for short (3 minutes) and long (60 minutes) time intervals. The calculated error of 99,2% of the short time intervals and 100% of the long time intervals analyzed, remain within commonly recognized margins of 10% and 3% of detection error respectively.