A New Microscopic Approach to Traffic Flow Classification Using a Convolutional Neural Network Object Detector and a Multi-Tracker Algorithm

Traffic congestion is a significant issue in urban areas and can cause adverse effects. In this paper, our proposal categorizes the traffic activity from video through three steps: vehicle monitoring, feature extraction, and classification. The vehicle monitoring step comprises an object detector based on a convolutional neural network and multi-object tracker. The feature extraction step uses information related to each detected vehicle, in various points of the road, to represent the traffic condition through three features: density, flow, and velocity. We tested on the UCSD dataset and achieved the best performance with 98.82% of accuracy, which outperformed the state-of-the-art methods.