Image Processing Assisted GIS for Traffic Enforcement Using Vehicle Tracking System

Vehicle tracking systems are conventionally used for applications like fleet management, logistics, online taxi service, asset tracking, fuel monitoring etc. Vehicle tracking system comprises of Vehicle Tracking Device (VTD) mounted on the vehicles, which sends current data like location, speed and alerts to a backend software system. The software system processes the data from device to generate reports, plot the vehicle locations on a GIS map etc. Apart from the normal applications of vehicle tracking, this technology can be used for the purpose of traffic enforcement and safety by the Transport or Police department of a state or country. In India, the state of Kerala has an upcoming implementation of vehicle tracking system to assist enforcement and safety. The proposed system mandates public transport vehicles to be fitted with VTD and the vehicles shall be monitored from the control room. The backend software processes the data to generate reports of offences such as over speeding, entry to restricted area etc. for each vehicle connected to the system. The offence report lists out the details of offences including location, time, offence and a snapshot of the location with a marker at the point of offence. The snapshot of map is obtained from the static map functionality of the GIS platform using center geo-coordinate, width, height and zoom level as inputs. Depending on the zoom level of the GIS map, the image generated may or may not contain any text content as a reference to identify the location of offence. This paper proposes to use image processing mechanisms to identify presence of text content on the GIS image which helps the offence processing system to select GIS image at the appropriate zoom level, so as to identify text content for reference.