AUTOMATIC VEHICLE LOCATION USING CAMERAS: A DEMONSTRATION

The ability to perform Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) is a requirement of a variety of applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems like vehicle guidance, dynamic route optimization, scheduling, bus stop annunciation, security, fleet tracking, etc. The authors describe a new approach to AVL where a simple sensor matches visual data against a stored database to determine position, in combination with standard dead-reckoning. Their system is completely self-contained in that it requires no infrastructure external to the vehicle such as beacons or satellites. It can provide better accuracy than the satellite based Global Positioning System (GPS), while functioning well in the dense urban environments where GPS is prone to failure. In cases where the vehicle is constrained to a local area (buses, trains, police cars, ...) it could serve as an inexpensive stand alone AVL system. For free-ranging vehicles (intercity trucks, private autos, ...) it could serve as a supplement to GPS for travel in urban areas.