{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,20]],"date-time":"2026-04-20T10:23:49Z","timestamp":1776680629916,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":34,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"23","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,11,24]],"date-time":"2023-11-24T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1700784000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004681","name":"Higher Education Commission","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["National Center for Big Data and Cloud Computing"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["National Center for Big Data and Cloud Computing"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004681","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Traffic flow analysis is essential to develop smart urban mobility solutions. Although numerous tools have been proposed, they employ only a small number of parameters. To overcome this limitation, an edge computing solution is proposed based on nine traffic parameters, namely, vehicle count, direction, speed, and type, flow, peak hour factor, density, time headway, and distance headway. The proposed low-cost solution is easy to deploy and maintain. The sensor node is comprised of a Raspberry Pi 4, Pi camera, Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick 2, Xiaomi MI Power Bank, and Zong 4G Bolt+. Pre-trained models from the OpenVINO Toolkit are employed for vehicle detection and classification, and a centroid tracking algorithm is used to estimate vehicle speed. The measured traffic parameters are transmitted to the ThingSpeak cloud platform via 4G. The proposed solution was field-tested for one week (7 h\/day), with approximately 10,000 vehicles per day. The count, classification, and speed accuracies obtained were 79.8%, 93.2%, and 82.9%, respectively. The sensor node can operate for approximately 8 h with a 10,000 mAh power bank and the required data bandwidth is 1.5 MB\/h. The proposed edge computing solution overcomes the limitations of existing traffic monitoring systems and can work in hostile environments.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s23239385","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,11,24]],"date-time":"2023-11-24T06:51:28Z","timestamp":1700808688000},"page":"9385","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":12,"title":["Edge Computing for Effective and Efficient Traffic Characterization"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"23","author":[{"given":"Asif","family":"Khan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2, Canada"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7749-1635","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Khurram S.","family":"Khattak","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Peshawar 25000, Pakistan"}]},{"given":"Zawar H.","family":"Khan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2, Canada"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9919-0323","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Thomas Aaron","family":"Gulliver","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2, Canada"}]},{"family":"Abdullah","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"National Center for Big Data and Cloud Computing, University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Peshawar 25000, Pakistan"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,11,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"181","DOI":"10.19101\/IJACR.2020.1048096","article-title":"Cyber physical system for vehicle counting and emission monitoring","volume":"10","author":"Khan","year":"2020","journal-title":"Int. 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