A new method for traffic density estimation based on topic model

Traffic density estimation plays an integral role in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), using which provides important information for signal control and effective traffic management. In this paper, we present a new framework for traffic density estimation based on topic model, which is an unsupervised model. This framework uses a set of visual features without any need to individual vehicle detection and tracking, and discovers the motion patterns automatically in traffic scenes by using topic model. Then, likelihood value allocated to each video clip enables us to estimate its traffic density. Results on a standard dataset show high classification performance of our proposed approach and robustness to typical environmental and illumination conditions.