Intelligent Transportation System

According to Sigua (2008), Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is the application of

information and communication technologies to surface traffic and transportation systems. As for
the ITS experience in the Philippines, a signaling project known as SMART System which
utilizes Australias SCATS is undertaken by the DPWH-TEC for the upgrading and development
of traffic signals in the metropolis. SCATS uses loop detectors embedded in the pavement over
the white lane separation lines near intersections to determine the congestion level of road
networks. However, when the wheels of stopped vehicles cover these sensors. The system can no
longer count the vehicle flow. The system becomes incapable of switching on the signal lights
properly and the disabled sensor gives delayed or wrong signals. At present, MMDA explains
that SCATS is no longer working. The supposedly full automated traffic light system is now
utilized as a fixed time system where the scheduling of the traffic signals cycle length s
manually configured.

Vision-Based Traffic System

Selecting the most appropriate technology for the Philippines is thoroughly taken into
consideration because what is applicable in other countries may not be applicable for us. As per
Gopalakrishna (2011), the current techniques for road-traffic monitoring rely on sensors that
have limited capabilities and are often both costly and disruptive to install. Camera-based
automatic traffic counting and classification system addresses some of the disadvantages of the
traditional sensor-based systems. Apart from addressing some of the portability issues, limited
capacity, maintenance and implementation difficulties of several other traffic detector types such

as inductive loops, infrared, ultrasonic, microwave, radar, GPS data logger and radio frequency
tag as enumerated by Wang (2004). The proposed vision-based traffic control system is cost
effective, robust and understandable to the people that the public can easily grasp the concept
and for that reason, the actual benefits are regarded and fully optimized.

Vehicle Detection and Extraction

One essential application of computer vision and image processing is traffic management
and control. In the urban traffic measurement system, vehicle detection is a very challenging task
particularly in Metro Manila. A great deal of work has been carried out for vehicle detection and
density estimation from video sequences. Sanchez (2011) adopted a video-based traffic analysis
in which from live video recordings of a road scene, the goal is to detect and track vehicles
passing through a controlled area. Detected vehicles are enclosed by bounding boxes or yellow
rectangles with their corresponding unique identification numbers displayed in red near the
boxes. However, this approach is impractical for compounding volume-based congestion. If a
large database of identification numbers has been collected, applying capacity-management
measures and other compression techniques for manageable data storage can affect the detection
accuracy. In addition, the previously mentioned approach requires additional processing as every
single identification number is displayed and kept for each vehicle throughout the tracking
process.
On the other hand, instead of characterizing every vehicle passing by any enter region,
Malhi (2011) defined a region of interest in which the system calculates the number of vehicles
in that particular frame from a video sequence. When a vehicle is detected in that area of interest,

an indicative rectangle is plotted at its boundary and the count is incremented. However, the
inability to handle overlapping and merging of tracking rectangles still exists. Generally, most
vehicle tracking methods based on motion detection is incapable of segmenting vehicles that are
partially occluded. As Niksaz (2012) explains, if vehicles enter the detection region partially
occluded, the system will group two vehicles into a single moving object and it will cause
significant measurement errors. Correspondingly, the approach of tracking moving vehicles in
video streams is not suitable for dealing with congested urban traffic especially in Metro Manila
because the congestion cause slow-moving traffic where vehicles lack motion.