Machine Vision Toolkit for Automated Fleet Composition Assessment and Reporting

State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) employ fleet composition data (e.g., passenger vehicles, single-unit trucks, and combination trucks) in a variety of planning, economic, roadway performance, and safety applications. Accurate fleet composition data is essential for pavement management, safety analysis, and fuel consumption modeling. However, traditional methods are labor-intensive, costly, and often lack the temporal or spatial resolution required to capture variations between freeways, arterials, and managed lanes vs. general-purpose lanes. Using machine vision tools to quickly, efficiently, and accurately capture on-road percentages of light-duty vehicle, light-duty truck, medium-duty truck, and a variety of heavy-duty truck classifications will enhance analytical and modeling accuracy and reduce state DOT data management costs. Building upon prior NCST research that developed machine vision algorithms for vehicle identification, this project will package those research findings into a deployable, open-source Automated Fleet Classification Toolkit for practitioners and researchers. The research team will develop and release comprehensive Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and software tools allowing agencies to convert standard roadside or overpass video feeds into high-resolution fleet composition data. The toolkit will utilize advanced object detection (e.g., YOLO architectures) to automate the identification of vehicle classes (aligning with FHWA 13-category schemes where possible) and propulsion types based on visual vehicle features. The system is designed to distinguish traffic conditions on complex roadway geometries, allowing users to generate separate classification profiles for managed lanes vs. general-purpose lanes, and separating freeway mainlines from adjacent arterial service roads. The project focuses on technology transfer: providing the "how-to" manuals, open-source code, and data processing protocols so that State DOTs, consultants, university partners and research institutes can replicate the data collection and extraction without relying on proprietary "black box" services. 

Research Area

Tags