Short-term traffic flow prediction plays a key role of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which supports traffic planning, traffic management and control, roadway safety evaluation, energy consumption estimation, etc. The widely deployed traffic sensors provide us numerous and continuous traffic flow data, which may contain outlier samples due to expected sensor failures. The primary objective of the study was to evaluate the use of various smoothing models for cleaning anomaly in traffic flow data, which were further processed to predict short term traffic flow evolution with artificial neural network. The wavelet filter, moving average model, and Butterworth filter were carefully tested to smooth the collected loop detector data. Then, the artificial neural network was introduced to predict traffic flow at different time spans, which were quantitatively analyzed with commonly-used evaluation metrics. The findings of the study provide us efficient and accurate denoising approaches for short term traffic flow prediction.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become an increasingly popular tool for traffic monitoring and data collection on highways due to its advantage of low cost, high resolution, good flexibility, and wide spatial coverage. Extracting high-resolution vehicle trajectory data from aerial videos taken by a UAV flying over target highway segment becomes a critical research task for traffic flow modeling and analysis. This study aims at proposing a novel methodological framework for automatic and accurate vehicle trajectory extraction from aerial videos. The method starts by developing an ensemble detector to detect vehicles in the target region. Then, the kernelized correlation filter is applied to track vehicles fast and accurately. After that, a mapping algorithm is proposed to transform vehicle positions from the Cartesian coordinates in image to the Frenet coordinates to extract raw vehicle trajectories along the roadway curves. The data denoising is then performed using a wavelet transform to eliminate the biased vehicle trajectory positions. Our method is tested on two aerial videos taken on different urban expressway segments in both peak and non-peak hours on weekdays. The extracted vehicle trajectories are compared with manual calibrated data to testify the framework performance. The experimental results show that the proposed method successfully extracts vehicle trajectories with a high accuracy: the measurement error of Mean Squared Deviation is 2.301 m, the Root-mean-square deviation is 0.175 m, and the Pearson correlation coefficient is 0.999. The video and trajectory data in this study are publicly accessible for serving as benchmark at https://seutraffic.com.