Vision-Based Density Estimation for Adaptive Traffic Control

Abstract

Traffic congestion is becoming a critical challenge in rapidly growing urban centers, particularly in developing nations where rapid urbanization and inadequate transport infrastructure place increasing strain on transport networks. In highly heterogeneous and chaotic traffic flows, camera-based traffic-state estimation is limited by severe vehicle occlusion and overlap. In this paper, we propose a framework to optimize traffic flow directly from stochastic visual observations. The architecture is structurally decoupled into three primary components: (a) vehicle density estimation, (b) predictive dynamics modeling, and (c) policy optimization. The proposed methodology introduces a convolutional neural network (CNN) that learns the mapping from camera feeds to spatial density maps, utilizing an adaptive k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN) Gaussian kernel to handle varying congestion levels. This feeds into an ST3DNet predictive module for spatiotemporal forecasting, followed by a hierarchical Graph-Transformer Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm to optimize signal phases. The density estimation stage was evaluated on 40 annotated intersection images from Rambagh 4, Jaipur, India, with a reported five-fold validation mean absolute error (MAE) of $3.32 \pm 0.95$ vehicles and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 14.5%. These results pertain to the perception component; empirical training and evaluation of the forecasting and control stages remain future work.