Scalable Dynamic Origin-Destination Demand Estimation Enhanced by High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Data
This addresses traffic modeling challenges for urban planners by providing a scalable solution, though it is incremental as it enhances existing methods with new data sources.
The study tackled dynamic origin-destination demand estimation in traffic networks by integrating high-resolution satellite imagery with conventional sensor data, resulting in improved estimation accuracy, particularly for links without local sensors, as demonstrated in out-of-sample tests.
This study presents a novel integrated framework for dynamic origin-destination demand estimation (DODE) in multi-class mesoscopic network models, leveraging high-resolution satellite imagery together with conventional traffic data from local sensors. Unlike sparse local detectors, satellite imagery offers consistent, city-wide road and traffic information of both parking and moving vehicles, overcoming data availability limitations. To extract information from imagery data, we design a computer vision pipeline for class-specific vehicle detection and map matching, generating link-level traffic density observations by vehicle class. Building upon this information, we formulate a computational graph-based DODE model that calibrates dynamic network states by jointly matching observed traffic counts and travel times from local sensors with density measurements derived from satellite imagery. To assess the accuracy and scalability of the proposed framework, we conduct a series of numerical experiments using both synthetic and real-world data. The results of out-of-sample tests demonstrate that supplementing traditional data with satellite-derived density significantly improves estimation performance, especially for links without local sensors. Real-world experiments also confirm the framework's capability to handle large-scale networks, supporting its potential for practical deployment in cities of varying sizes. Sensitivity analysis further evaluates the impact of data quality related to satellite imagery data.