Traffic Flow Monitoring in Crowded Cities

Traffic monitoring systems usually make assumptions about the movement of vehicles, such as that they drive in dedicated lanes, and that those lanes rarely include non-vehicle clutter. Urban settings within developing countries often present extremely chaotic traffic scenarios which make these assumptions unrealistic. We show how a standard approach to traffic monitoring can be made more robust by using probabilistic inference, and in such a way that we bypass the need for vehicle segmentation. Instead of tracking individual vehicles but treat a lane of traffic as a fluid and estimate the rate of flow. Our modelling of uncertainty allows us to accurately monitor traffic flow even in the presence of substantial clutter.