Provide an Automated Web-based Platform for Collecting Traffic Data

Traffic and its problems have become a big social issue in all societies today. Knowing essential factors that affect traffic, and the factors that aggravate traffic can be useful for managing the traffic. Nowadays, the problem of traffic forecasting has become a goal among different countries. If one can predict the traffic, he can prevent the waste of energy and time. Predicting the traffic situation and its behavior, especially in big cities, requires managing, planning, and spending time. Geographic Information System (GIS) is an important technology and science for spatial analysis. Since traffic is a spatial and temporal problem, this science can well manage the problem of traffic. In the field of traffic, people often look for a route that meets the criteria of being short, low cost, and consuming the least amount of energy. For this reason, traffic is one of the most influential factors in choosing the route to reach the destination. It can be said that people prefer a long route with little traffic to a short route with heavy one. Thus, traffic affects many optimal route equations. Therefore, it is clear that the main criterion for choosing a route is the traffic situation on the relevant route. In this research, the collection of traffic data of Tehran province has been done using the proposed platform. Traffic data exists in real time, but the problem is that there is no platform for data collection. The lack of a suitable platform for storing traffic data has always been a problem that has challenged researchers in this field. Therefore, in this research, a method for collecting and storing traffic data on the web platform has been proposed. In this research, traffic images are first captured from web platforms. Then the intensity of the traffic is identified based on the color scheme. According to the position of the pixels in the image and the existing control points, the ground coordinates of all the pixels are calculated. Finally, the collected coordinates are stored in the database based on the standard spatial format. Finally traffic data is stored in the database instantly based on the current system. During this research, it was found that the point that has heavy traffic has heavy traffic in most hours of the day. It was also found that places with heavy traffic have a uniform behavior during different days of the week. In other words, it is rarely seen that points with different traffic loads have a significant difference in the traffic situation. In terms of accuracy, it can be stated that the collection of traffic data points has been done with acceptable accuracy in terms of location. The collected points are also the most compatible with other data in the database.