SmartRoad: A Crowd-Sourced Traffic Regulator Detection and Identification System

This 2013 paper focuses on crowd sourced information and particularly the use of the GPS sensor smartphone application SmartRoad. The authors present SmartRoad, a crowd-sourced sensing system that detects and identifies traffic regulators, traffic lights and stop signs. The authors implement the SmartRoad application on a vehicular smartphone testbed and deploy the application on 35 user smartphone-equipped vehicles over a period of two months. The authors argue that the system is an alternative to expensive road surveys as it works on participatory sensing data collected via GPS sensors for smartphones in vehicles. They argue that the resulting traffic regular information can be used for many assisted-driving or navigation systems.

This article will be of use to PVE researchers and practitioners interested in the use of crowdsourcing smartphone applications that utilize GPS capabilities, as well as more advanced developers interested in applications for smartphone based crowdsourcing. The experiments conducted by the authors indicate that their SmartRoad app can robustly, effectively and efficiently carry out its detection and identification tasks without consuming excessive communication energy/bandwidth or requiring too much ground truth information.