Evaluation of Vehicle Tracking for Traffic Monitoring Based on Road Surface Mounted Magnetic Sensors

The aim of this work is to evaluate a vehicle tracking scheme as a means of monitoring traffic on roads. The scheme can be used as a component in a traffic monitoring system which can provide traffic management systems and road maintainers with traffic information. Vehicle tracking is achieved by determining vehicle position, velocity and magnetic moment using a nonlinear weighted least squares method (NWLS) on readings from two 3-axes magnetic sensors. The tracking was performed both in simulation and in real life. The traffic monitoring system is composed of two adjacently glue attached wireless sensor nodes, which are placed at a distance of 1 m along the road. A potential misalignment of the sensors due to placement errors is analyzed in simulation and addressed.