UAV-based aerial monitoring for highway traffic safety and sustainable mobility
Vyshak SURESHKUMAR, Khalifa HARIB
Abstract. The growth of highway traffic demands monitoring systems that are flexible, wide-area, and accurate. Ground-based speed detectors (radar, fixed cameras) are effective but limited in coverage and adaptability. This work investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a quadcopter, as a mobile platform for traffic speed monitoring. A six-DOF mathematical model capturing kinematics, gyroscopic effects, and external forces/moments is implemented in MATLAB/Simulink. A PID closed-loop controller stabilizes altitude, yaw, and pitch, and simulations show responsive, stable flight suitable for continuous aerial video capture. For speed estimation, video from the onboard camera is processed frame-by-frame using background subtraction with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), morphological filtering, and multi-frame tracking. To handle concurrent UAV and vehicle motion, Lucas-Kanade optical flow methods are evaluated alongside object tracking. A MATLAB pipeline converts pixel displacement to physical velocity, achieving an average error of 0.25–0.30%, primarily attributable to camera calibration. Results demonstrate that UAV-based speed monitoring is feasible and offers adaptable, scalable coverage while maintaining accuracy, extending current traffic systems rather than relying only on fixed enforcement installations.
Keywords
Traffic Monitoring, UAV Modelling, Image Processing, Gaussian Mixture Model, Lucas-Kanade
Published online 6/20/2026, 9 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Vyshak SURESHKUMAR, Khalifa HARIB, UAV-based aerial monitoring for highway traffic safety and sustainable mobility, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 67, pp 517-525, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904176-68
The article was published as article 68 of the book Climate Action and Sustainability
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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