Multi-sensor data fusion for traffic planning and control

Traffic and mobility are essential ingredients of modern society, as they are important prerequisites for economic and social prosperity. Due to opportunities provided by modern technologies, traffic management has become an important component in improving quality and safety, especially in road traffic. The objective of this paper is to present a novel approach to performing data correlation and to extend the developed techniques and processing strategies to satellite COSMO-SkyMed data (CSK) in the framework of terrestrial Strategic Picture-based applications. By using an integrated system based on satellite, acoustic and GPS data, wide-area images of the entire road network can complement the selectively acquired data. The integration would take benefit of the enhanced imaging capabilities of COSMO-SkyMed and its high revisit rate given by the future constellation configuration, thus leading to fully exploitable in situ/EO integrated products. The preliminary test activity was performed in November 2010: there were promising results from the innovative system based on the heterogeneous data fusion, from Synthetic Aperture Radar to GPS and Acoustic Sensors.