Purpose Large area traffic monitoring with high spatial and temporal resolution is a challenge that cannot be served by today available
static infrastructure. Therefore, we present an automatic near real-time traffic monitoring approach using data of an airborne
digital camera system with a frame rate of up to 3 fps.
Methods By performing direct georeferencing on the obtained aerial images with the use of GPS/IMU data we are able to conduct near
real-time traffic data extraction. The traffic processor consists mainly of three steps which are road extraction supported
by a priori knowledge of road axes obtained from a road database, vehicle detection by edge extraction, and vehicle tracking
based on normalized cross correlation.
Results Traffic data is obtained with a correctness of up to 79% at a completeness of 68%.
Conclusions With this system we are able to perform area-wide traffic monitoring with high actuality independent from any stationed infrastructure
which makes the system well suited for deployments on demand in case of disasters and mass events.