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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Road Traffic Flow Prediction Using Aerial Imagery

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Technological advancements have increased the potential and feasibility of widespread drone networks. Among other tasks, monitoring road traffic flow is a task well-suited for such networks. While real-time traffic flow estimation systems have been explored at length and exist as commercial services, these systems have limited spatial reasoning and suffer in accuracy when predicting future traffic conditions. To that end, graph neural networks can account for spatial patterns, and can more effectively capture the impact of a region’s current traffic conditions on neighboring regions in the future. Our work builds on prior graph neural network architectures for traffic flow prediction. While current traffic prediction models are trained on ground-based data with limited features, we propose leveraging aerial traffic data to train spatiotemporal models with richer feature spaces. Our research makes contributions towards assembling a dataset from aerial footage and predicting traffic across a road network given aerial images from a small set of drones.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2021

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Pabla, Simran K.
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Balakrishnan, Hamsa

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139176
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/139176

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Pabla, Simran K.. Road Traffic Flow Prediction Using Aerial Imagery. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139176