GlobalSense

A Novel Framework to Study Vehicular Networks using Planet-scale Online WebCams

 

Team: 
Dr. Pan Hui &  Dr. Hamed Ketabdar (Detusche Telekom Research Laboratories, Berlin) 
Prof. Ahmed Helmy (CISE, University of Florida)

     
Summary: Realistic modeling of vehicular mobility has been particu- larly challenging due to a lack of large libraries of mea- surements in the research community. In this paper we in- troduce a novel method for large-scale monitoring, analysis, and identification of spatio-temporal models for vehicular mobility using the freely available online webcams in cities across the globe. We collect vehicular mobility traces from 2,700 traffic webcams in 10 different cities for several months and generate a mobility dataset of 7.5 Terabytes consisting of 125 million of images. To the best of our knowl- edge, this is the largest data set ever used in such study. To process and analyze this data, we propose an efficient and scalable algorithm to estimate traffic density based on background image subtraction. Initial results show that at least 82% of individual cameras with less than 5% devia- tion from four cities follow Loglogistic distribution and also 94% cameras from Toronto follow gamma distribution. The aggregate results from each city also demonstrate that Log- Logistic and gamma distribution pass the KS-test with 95% confidence. Furthermore, many of the camera traces exhibit long range dependence, with self-similarity evident in the aggregates of traffic (per city). We believe our novel data collection method and dataset provide a much needed contribution to the research community for realistic modeling of vehicular networks and mobility.
    

Publications:

  1. Modeling and Characterization of Urban Streets' Vehicular Mobility using Web Cameras
    Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2012), Workshop on Network Science for Communication Networks (Infocom - NetSciCom), 2012
    Gautam S. Thakur, Pan Hui, Ahmed Helmy [PPT]
  2. Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Planet Scale Vehicular Imagery Data[Link]
    IEEE International conference on Data Mining workshop on Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Data Mining, (ICDM - SSTDM), 2011
    Gautam S. Thakur, Pan Hui, Ahmed Helmy
  3. G. S. Thakur, P. Hui and A. Helmy
    GlobalSense: A Framework to Study Planet-Scale Vehicle Mobility,
    In ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Mobicom 2011, Poster[Link]
  4. G. S. Thakur, P. Hui and A. Helmy
    A Framework for Realistic Vehicular Network Modeling using Planet-scale Public Webcams
    CISE Tech Report [Link]
  5. G. S. Thakur, P. Hui and A. Helmy
    Towards Realistic Vehicular Network Modeling Using Planet-scale Public Webcams,
    In CoRR ’ 11 [Link]