To facilitate the monitoring and management of modern transportation systems, monocular visual traffic surveillance systems have been widely adopted for speed measurement, accident detection, and accident prediction. Thanks to the recent innovations in computer vision and deep learning research, the performance of visual traffic surveillance systems has been significantly improved. However, despite this success, there is a lack of survey papers that systematically review these new methods. Therefore, we conduct a systematic review of relevant studies to fill this gap and provide guidance to future studies. This paper is structured along the visual information processing pipeline that includes object detection, object tracking, and camera calibration. Moreover, we also include important applications of visual traffic surveillance systems, such as speed measurement, behavior learning, accident detection and prediction. Finally, future research directions of visual traffic surveillance systems are outlined.

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) advance, the integration of Large (Vision) Language Models (LLMs and VLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance AV capabilities in perception, planning, decision-making, and data generation. However, the practical challenges of incorporating LLMs and VLMs into AV systems, including computational efficiency, real-time processing, and ethical considerations, remain underexplored. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive review of the current research on LLM and VLM applications in AVs, focusing on the following key areas: modular integration, end-to-end integration, data generation, evaluation platforms, datasets, and benchmarks. We systematically analyse 77 recent papers published before Sep 2025, detailing their methodologies and models. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs and VLMs to improve AV system performance while acknowledging limitations. This survey offers researchers and practitioners a panoptic view of the classification and progression of LLMs and VLMs in the AV sphere, while systematically distilling models to their core components. We envision this survey as a central reference for AV researchers navigating this rapidly evolving landscape to accelerate future research.

Autonomous vehicles need to continuously analyse the driving context and establish a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic traffic environment. To ensure the safety and efficiency of their operations, it would be beneficial to have accurate predictions of surrounding vehicles’ future trajectories. AVs can adjust their motions proactively to improve road safety and comfort with such information. This paper proposes a novel approach to predict the future trajectories of interacting vehicles, through a model of potential spatial-temporal interactions. A unique kernel function that emphasises risk-awareness was developed to extract spatial dependencies. The established model was trained and evaluated with the publicly available Highway Drone Dataset and Intersection Drone Dataset. The performance of the developed model was assessed with eight state-of-the-art methods. An ablation study and safety analysis were also conducted to evaluate the proposed risk-awareness kernel function. Results show that the proposed model’s inference speed is over eight times faster than the commonly used LSTM-based models. It also achieves an improvement of over 8% in prediction accuracy when compared with the state-of-the-art model.

All human drivers can be characterised by their habitual choice of driving behaviours, which results in a wide range of observed driving patterns and manoeuvres. Developing control strategies for autonomous vehicles that address this feature would increase the public acceptance of such vehicles. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel approach to developing rule-based fuzzy logic driver models that simulate different driving styles in the car-following regimes. These driver models were trained with the collected on-road driving data to capture corresponding human drivers’ characteristics. The proposed approach consists of three main components: collecting on-road driving data, developing a vehicle model, and establishing the car-following driver models. Firstly, an instrumented vehicle was used to collect driving data over the same route for three consecutive months. Car-following scenarios during these journeys were extracted, and related data were processed accordingly. Afterwards, a representative model of the instrumented vehicle was created and evaluated. Finally, a fuzzy logic driver model that uses humanized inputs was developed and calibrated with the recorded data. The developed driver model’s performance was assessed using the collected driving data and a baseline PID driver model. With the performance validated, models representing more aggressive and more defensive driving styles were derived following the same procedure. A cross-driver analysis was then implemented in a normalized car-following scenario with the established vehicle model to investigate the impacts of different driving styles further. The developed driver model can introduce driving styles into drive cycle experiments and replicate on-road real driving emission tests in the laboratory. Moreover, as the proposed method has high robustness to incomplete datasets, it can be a more cost-effective option to facilitate the development of humanized and customized vehicle control strategies for autonomous driving.