Traffic flow measurement for smart traffic light system design

Determining congestions on intersection roads can significantly improve the performance of a traffic light system. One of the everyday problems on our roads nowadays is the unbalanced traffic on different roads. The blind view of roads and the dependency on the conventional timer-based traffic light systems can cause unnecessary delays on some arterial roads on expense of offering a needless extra pass time on some other secondary minor roads. In this paper, a foreground extraction model has been built in MATLAB platform to measure the congestions on the different roads constructing an intersection. Results show a satisfactory performance in terms of accuracy in counting cars and in consequence reducing the wait time on some major roads. System was tested under different weather and lighting conditions, and results were adequately promising.