Traffic Density Estimation by Distributed Proxy Model Learning for Internet of Vehicle

Autonomous driving has been significantly advanced in today’s society, which revolutionized daily routines and facilitated the development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). A crucial aspect of this system is understanding traffic density to enable intelligent traffic management. With the rapid improvement in deep neural networks (DNNs), the accuracy of density estimation has markedly improved. However, there are two main issues that remain unsolved. First, current DNN-based models are excessively heavy, characterized by an overwhelming number of training parameters (millions or even billions) and substantial computational complexity, indicated by a high number of FLOPs. These requirements for storage and computation severely limit the practical application of these models, especially on edge devices with limited capacity and computational power. Second, despite the superior performance of DNN models, their effectiveness largely depends on the availability of large-scale data for training. Growing privacy concerns have made individuals increasingly hesitant to allow their data to be publicly used for model training, particularly in vehicle-related applications that might reveal personal movements, which leads to data isolation issues. In this article, we address these two problems at once with a systematic framework. Specifically, we introduce the proxy model distributed learning (PMDL) model for traffic density estimation. PMDL model is composed of two main components. First, we introduce a proxy model learning strategy that transfers fine-grained knowledge from a larger master model to a lightweight proxy model, i.e., a proxy model. Second, we design a distributed learning strategy that trains multiple proxy models with privacy-aware local data and seamlessly aggregates these models via a global parameter server. This ensures privacy protection while significantly improving estimation performance compared to training models with limited, isolated data. We tested the proposed model on four major vehicle density analysis benchmarks and demonstrated its efficiency by outperforming other state-of-the-art competitors. The code is available at https://github.com/jinyongch/DPML.