Flow reconstruction for data-driven traffic animation

Abstract

Figure 1: The divided highway is populated with vehicle traffic using our flow reconstruction method. Individual virtual cars are animated and correspond to real-world traffic conditions measured by road sensors. The vehicle motions are simulated on a GIS-derived domain and overlaid on a public domain aerial image from the U.S. Geological Survey. Abstract'Virtualized traffic' reconstructs and displays continuous traffic flows from discrete spatio-temporal traffic sensor data or procedurally generated control input to enhance a sense of immersion in a dynamic virtual environment. In this paper, we introduce a fast technique to reconstruct traffic flows from in-road sensor measurements or procedurally generated data for interactive 3D visual applications. Our algorithm estimates the full state of the traffic flow from sparse sensor measurements (or procedural input) using a statistical inference method and a continuum traffic model. This estimated state then drives an agent-based traffic simulator to produce a 3D animation of vehicle traffic that statistically matches the original traffic conditions. Unlike existing traffic simulation and animation techniques, our method produces a full 3D rendering of individual vehicles as part of continuous traffic flows given discrete spatio-temporal sensor measurements. Instead of using a color map to indicate traffic conditions, users could visualize and fly over the reconstructed traffic in real time over a large digital cityscape.

A Personalized Multi-Path and Multi-User Traffic Analysis and Visualization Tool

“…In [2], the authors created an application that attempts to reconstruct and display the continuous traffic flow on different routes based on the data collected by sets of road sensors which measure the distances and speeds. The algorithm estimates the full state of the traffic flow by using statistical inference methods and being able to reconstruct a 3D version of the traffic at a particular date and hour on the particular routes, the main focus of the application being the highway traffic.…”

Traffic situation visualization based on video composition

“…However, the method consumes heavy transmission load when too many traffic videos are displayed at a time. Another approach to achieve the aim is traffic simulation [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. The methods first estimate the full traffic state based on the sparse VD sensing data, followed by simulating the dynamics of all individual vehicles to create animations.…”

Virtualized Traffic at Metropolitan Scales

“…To create virtualized traffic representations, in Wilkie et al (2013), we proposed an efficient approach to creating animations that match observations, which could originate either from real-world traffic sensors or from a procedural system to allow the creation of controlled traffic animations. An overview of our approach is shown in Figure 3.…”