Traffic Control
Many cities and districts have developed traffic control systems to help monitor the movement and flow of vehicles around the road network. This had typically involved looking at historical data, estimates, observations and statistics such as:
- Car park usage
- Pedestrian crossing usage
- Number of vehicles along a road
- Areas of low and high congestion
- Frequency, location and cause of road works
CCTV cameras can be used to help traffic control centres by giving them live data, allowing for traffic management decisions to be made in real-time. By using ANPR on this footage it is possible to monitor the travel of individual vehicles, automatically providing information about the speed and flow of various routes. These details can highlight problem areas as and when they occur and helps the centre to make informed incident management decisions.
Some counties of the United Kingdom have worked with Siemens Traffic to develop traffic monitoring systems for their own control centres and for the public. Projects such as Hampshire County Council's ROMANSE provide an interactive and real-time web site showing details about traffic in the city. The site shows information about car parks, ongoing road works, special events and footage taken from CCTV cameras. ANPR systems can be used to provide average driving times along particular routes, giving drivers the ability to choose which one to take. ROMANSE also allows travellers to see the current situation using a mobile device with an Internet connection (such as WAP, GPRS or 3G), thus allowing them to be alerted to any problems that are ahead.
The UK company Trafficmaster has used ANPR since 1998 to estimate average traffic speeds on non-motorway roads without the results being skewed by local fluctuations caused by traffic lights and similar. The company now operates a network of over 4000 ANPR cameras, but claims that only the four most central digits are identified, and no numberplate data is retained.
- IEEE transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems(IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society) published some papers on the plate number recognition technologies and applications.
Read more about this topic: Automatic Number Plate Recognition
Famous quotes containing the words traffic and/or control:
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