Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143

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Neurocomputing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neucom

Camera location for real-time traffic state estimation in urban road

network using big GPS data
Zhenyu Shan n, Qianqian Zhu
Intelligent Transportation and Information Security Lab, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Traffic camera has become a popular sensor for traffic state estimation in Intelligent Transportation
Received 5 May 2014 Systems (ITS). However, it is impracticable to cover the whole urban network. Then how to place sensors
Received in revised form in a certain network to ensure the accuracy for both installed and uninstalled roads is of great
14 November 2014
importance. The GPS-equipped taxis traveling on the urban roads yield big GPS data, which contains
Accepted 16 November 2014
Available online 16 May 2015
mass traffic information. In this paper, a traffic state network (TSN) will be presented to model the
relationship among all road sections based on these data. In TSN, the location problem is transformed to
Keywords: find a set of nodes in the network to maximize the received information. Then, it is verified NP-hard, and
Camera location a local optimal solution is presented to solve it in a linear complexity time based on greedy algorithm.
Traffic state estimation
The experiments were carried out on the GPS data from 8007 taxis traveling on 1432 sections for 197
Urban road network
days. The results show that the TSN effectively describes the relationship of road sections in traffic state,
GPS data
and performs better than random road location method and arterial road location method.
& 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction According to information theory, more information is more helpful

Traffic state estimation has played a key role in Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS), which is the basis of various ITS
services, such as route guidance, tour planning and traffic manage-
ment [1]. Nowadays, traffic cameras provide essential data for
high-accuracy and real-time estimation applications. However, it
is infeasible to cover all or most of the road sections in large urban
road network because of huge costs of installation and mainte-
nance. Hence agencies are called in to determine the locations of
cameras for efficiency. Their objective is to find out a set of roads
to install cameras to ensure the accuracy for the whole network.
In previous decades, researchers presented plenty of traffic state
estimation methods using video data from cameras installed above
the roads. These methods work well when there is more than one
camera installed on the road. But for uninstalled roads they perform
far from satisfying because there is no sensor data for estimation
[2]. It is named as the missing data problem. In order to overcome
this problem, some missing data estimation methods are proposed
such as history imputation methods [3], PPCA-based method [4],
compressive sensing based method [5] and STM method [6]. Most
of them are based on the observations that there are some relation-
ships between different road sections or adjacent time periods or
both of them. Through modeling the relationships, the uninstalled
roads can utilize the traffic information from the installed roads.
n
Corresponding author.
to eliminate the uncertainty of estimation [6]. The accuracy of state
estimation depends on the information quantity. So we should
make sure that the amount of information each road receives from
other roads and keep it enough.
Most of taxis traveling on the urban roads have been equipped
with Global Positioning System (GPS) over many years of construc-
tion and operation of ITS. These taxis yield large-scale GPS data
while the collection lasts a long period of time (such as one year). It
will cover the whole network and contain the traffic information of
each road. Thus, it is suitable to use the data to model the
relationship among different roads. What is more important is that
the GPS data will be collected much easier with the wide use of GPS
equipment. The source of the data is confined to taxis, while drivers
or passengers with mobile phones can also provide data.
In this paper, the big GPS data is applied to determine the
locations for traffic state estimation in urban road network. At first,
a traffic state network (TSN) is presented to model the GPS data by
the relationship of traffic state among different roads. The model is
an undirected weighted graph, where the node represents the road
section while the edge represents the information that can receive
from these connected nodes. The weight is measured by mutual
information (MI), which is often used as a measure of the variables
mutual dependence. In MI calculation, Gaussian mixture model
(GMM) is used to describe the distribution of traffic state. Based on
TSN, the sum of information received by each uninstalled node can
be calculated. In order to improve traffic state estimation, it should
keep each road receiving enough information. Thus, the aim is to

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2014.11.093
0925-2312/& 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
find a set of nodes in the network to space cameras to maximize the
received information. Its complexity equals to minimum dominat-
ing set problem and maximum dominating edge problem, which is
proved as an NP-hard problem. Then, according to greedy algo-
rithm, a TSN based location method is presented to get a local
optimal solution with linear complexity. This method can also be
applied in placing fixed installed sensors, thus traffic camera is
named as sensor instead.
The experiments were carried out on the GPS data for ten
months in Hangzhou, China. The results are shown as follows:
(1) the GMMs (order¼2) have a good performance in describing
the traffic speed distribution, when the missing rate of the GPS
data is below 35% and the number of days is larger than 15. It is
also the low bounds for the parameters training of TSN; (2) the
uninstalled roads in our method received more information than
random road location method and arterial road location method,
and have a better performance in traffic speed estimation.
Our contributions include the followings:
(1) The traffic state network is presented to transform the location
problem into a graph problem similar as a dominant set
problem. We experimentally analyzed the lower bound of data
volume for TSN training.
2) The location method based on TSN is verified as an NP-hard
problem. A method based on greedy algorithm is presented to
solve this problem in a linear complexity, which provides a
local optimal result.
3) The experimental data is collected from actual GPS-equipped
taxis in the urban road network. The results show that our
method is effective.
This paper is composed of six sections. The next section
provides a review of related work on the traffic sensors location
research. Section 3 describes the details of TSN. Section 4 presents
the TSN based method solving the graphic problem according to
the greedy algorithm. Section 5 examines the results using the
presented models. The final section draws a conclusion and
introduces some future work.
2. Review of related work
With the rapid progress of sensor technology, various types of
sensors (e.g., loop detectors [7], microwave [8], probe vehicles [9],
cameras [10], and cell phones [11]) are adopted to collect data for
traffic state estimation. Among these sensors, loop detectors, probe
vehicles and cameras are most widely used, and each has its own
strong and weak points. For loop detectors, they have better
performance in traffic state estimation but often limited by high
installment cost and damage rates. And these drawbacks rarely
happen in probe vehicles and cameras. But probe vehicles meet the
limitation of high missing rate and errors in the map-matching
process. Thus, some researchers devoted to fuse the data from
different sensors to make full use of traffic information. Cheu et al.
[12] presented a model based on neural network which achieved
good effectiveness in simulations. El Faouzi et al. [13] discussed the
best linear estimation and weighted least-square methods for
fusing the traffic data. Zhang et al. [14] developed architecture to
manage, analyze, and use the traffic data. Kong et al. [15] integrate
the federated Kalman filter and evidence theory to form a platform
for the fusion of multi-sensor data. However, it is always a difficult
task to locate kinds of sensors in the whole road network. Cameras
have been widely used for monitoring cars running red light. It will
reduce the cost to estimate the traffic state by the video from these
cameras and it has been interested the industry.
135
The GPS equipped probe vehicles are most likely to cover the
whole network because it is wide-spread, cheap and technically
easy to deal with [16]. The limitation is the data missing problem
mainly caused by uneven distribution of probe vehicles. Various
methods have been proposed to overcome this problem, mainly
focused on using the information in time and space dimension. For
time dimension, Chrobok et al. employed historical data with
similar traffic behavior to aggregate missing data, which is based
on road classification schemes such as Tele Atlas Functional Road
Classes [4,17] and day categories [18]. Without pre-classification,
Widhalm et al. [19] presented a GMM based method to learn
information about typical shapes of the diurnal speed time series.
Considering both of time and space dimension, Shan et al. [6]
modified the multiple linear regression models for applying the
information from adjacent times and roads with highest correla-
tion coefficients. Zhu et al. [5] proposed a compressive sensing
based algorithm through observation of the hidden structures
within the traffic states of a road network. The favorable results of
these methods reveal that it is a promising way to improve the
missing data estimation while receiving more information.
The received traffic information of the road lies on the sensor
placement. A variety of methods have been presented to determine
the sensors placement with different optimization objectives, such
as origin–destination (OD) matrix, travel time and traffic state. For
OD matrix, Van et al. [20] presented two models to estimate the OD
matrix from vehicle counts which seeks to reproduce the observed
link flows. The models are based on the information minimization
and entropy maximization principles. Fisk et al. [21] combined the
maximum entropy model with a user-equilibrium traffic model into
a single mathematical problem which can be solved by bi-level
programming. Their work inspired us to solve the location problem
by combining information theory with optimum technology. In
addition, the number of OD pairs is normally greater than the link
traffic stations. It can integrate the priori matrix with the counts
to identify a unique estimated matrix by statistical inference
approaches. Considering these, maximum likelihood method [22],
generalized least-squares method [23] and Bayesian inference
method [24] were proposed to optimize the OD matrix.
For travel time, new sensor technologies can track vehicles
identifications, hence can estimate the actual travel time between
any pair of sensors. Gentili et al. [25] investigated guidelines for
locating advanced traffic sensors that are able to read both the
identification and route information. Castillo et al. [26] determined
the optimal locations of vehicle plate scanning sensors for path flow
reconstruction. Fujito et al. [27] concluded that the actual placement
of sensors was critical in accurately estimating the traffic congestion
levels on a freeway segment. Liu et al. [28] found that it was
sufficient to have sensor stations placed at both ends of the segment
for free-flow conditions. Meanwhile they proposed rules and an
iterative procedure for locating a limited number of sensors. Li et al.
[29] used four different models to compute freeway segment travel
times by aggregating the constituent sections. However, this study
aims to determine the best method to estimate travel times instead
of determining the optimal sensor locations. Bartin et al. [30] adopted
K-means clustering algorithm to identify the optimal locations of
sensors, which has better travel time estimates than the equidistant
approach. However, most of these studies focused on freeway
segment and few attentions are paid to the urban network.
As for traffic state, most researchers are concerned about where
and how to place sensors on one certain road for more accurate
estimation. There still lack of research works in the perspective of
the whole network. In further, it is impossible to directly apply
existing location method for traffic state estimation because of
different optimization objectives. For OD matrix, the performance is
commonly measured by flow volume coverage [31]. Under this
measure, a single sensor located anywhere along an OD flow path is
136 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
sufficient for covering the flow. It cannot meet the demand of traffic
state estimation. For travel time, the objective is the same as that is
in freeway applications. Because the freeway has no intersections,
the average traffic speed of a freeway segment can be calculated by
its length dividing travel time. However, this condition is not easily
satisfied in urban network.
In recent years, large-scale and complex traffic data have been
collected with wide deployment of ITS. It is usually isolated or has
some dispersed links. This raises a new challenge to extract or mine
additional information from these large and complex data [32]. In
the field of big data, there is no general approach to this problem.
However, a powerful idea is to integrate the data to compose a
network by the links reflecting their relationships. The information
of the data is hidden in the network. Thus, the useful information or
solution methods can be obtained based on this network. There are
some significant and insightful studies currently being done on
social network sites like Facebook and Twitter [33]. For example,
they conducted sentiment analysis of messages to help predict job
losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a region [34]. On
complex gene networks, Aviv et al. [35] presented a mechanism
that extends the scope of evolutionary capacitance; Hamid [36]
presented a method to model genomic regulatory networks. In
these methods, the value of data comes from the patterns that can
be derived by making connections between pieces of data.
Recently, there are plenty of researches on ITS applications
based on traffic videos. For traffic control, a video-based approach
is presented to learn the specific driving characteristics of drivers
from the traffic videos [37]. For traffic flow estimation, a virtual
loop method is employed to improve the quality of vehicle
counting [38]. For adaptive traffic signaling, a video based scheme
is proposed for reducing waiting period of vehicles at road
junctions without detecting or tracking vehicles [39]. For traffic
speed and space occupancy estimate, a video system is built to
calculate traffic flow speed and road space occupancy, and recog-
nize three typical traffic states (congested, slow, and smooth) [41].
In these applications, the videos are applied to estimate traffic
parameters or traffic state in a direct or indirect way [40].
3. Traffic state network
3.1. Model description
The goal of our research is to determine the sensor locations so
as to optimize the estimation performance of all the road sections
with limited costs. The performance is depended on the received
information that one section can obtain from other sections. Thus,
it needs to build the relationships of received information between
all sections. Graph is a mathematical structure used to model
pairwise relations among finite objects [42]. For a certain urban
network, the number of sections is fixed. Thus, the traffic state
network is built based on the graph structure.
In the model, sections are regarded as nodes of the graph and
each pair of nodes are connected together with a weighted edge
reflecting the information quantity that one node can obtain from
the other. According to this definition, the relationship of traffic
state in the road network is transformed to an undirected weighted
graph G ¼ ðV; E; WÞ, where V is a finite set of nodes and E denotes
edges and W represents weights associated with each edge. It
connects sections by the relationship of their traffic state, thus
called traffic state network. One example is shown in Fig. 1. On TSN,
the objective of optimizing traffic sensor locations
can

be forma-
lized as follows: it is to find a set of nodes V n and
V n
¼ k, where
 
V n ¼ arg max min n ðΣ ðvi ;vjÞ A E Wðvi ; vj ÞÞ ð1Þ
vj A V n vi A V  V
Fig. 1. An example of traffic state network.
It aims to find k nodes, and ensure that the minimum sum of weight
of other n k nodes is the biggest in all possible combinations of
selection. For sensor location, there still exist two difficulties: one is
how to calculate the weight (W), which will be introduced in
Section 3.2; the other is how to determine V n in Section 4.
3.2. Weight definition
The definition of weight must obey the following two condi-
tions: (1) it can quantify the received information one node can
obtain from connected nodes; 2) it is unknown that which
methods will be used to estimate the missing data, so the weight
calculation method should be irrelevant with the missing data
estimation method. In information theory, mutual information
(MI ðX; Y Þ) is defined as the quantity of information obtained in X, if
the observation about Y is made [43]. It reveals the amount of
uncertainty that is reduced during the observation process. And it
is irrelevant to the observation methods. Thus, MI meets the two
requirements to define the weight. Formally, it is defined as
Z Z  
pðx; yÞ
MIðX; Y Þ ¼ pðx; yÞlog dx dy ð2Þ
Y X pðxÞpðyÞ
where pðx; yÞ is the joint probability distribution function of X and
Y, X and Y are variables of traffic state, and p(x) and p(y) are the
probability distribution of X and Y respectively.
According to the assumption of TSN, each node will receive
information from other nodes (often more than one). As a result,
the weight calculation is not only focused on the relationship
between two sections, but also among three or more sections. For
example, the traffic state of one road can be estimated based on
the data collected from sensors installed on other two sections.
According to (1), this multi-variable MI is added as
MIðX; 〈Y; Z〉Þ ¼ MIðX; YÞ þMIðX; ZÞ ð3Þ
However, the accumulation method does not satisfy the origi-
nal definition of MI. The reason is that there is a joint distribution
(intersection) between Y and Z. The extension from two to multi-
ple variables is not trivial, even for the simplest case of three
variables [44]. The reduction will lose information and make (3)
invalid. Furthermore, more variables mean greater computational
complexity in the extensions. When the variable number is bigger
than 5, their joint distribution is hard to be estimated in a
reasonable time.
In order to overcome this limitation, we experimentally analyze
the influence for variable MI calculation by using (3). The data
come from the GPS dataset and their introduction can be found in
Section 5.1. The r-variable (r ¼ 2; 3; 4; 5) MI is calculated by the
 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
Fig. 2. The relationship of MI value calculated by original definition (OD) and
accumulation method (AM).
original definition and the accumulation method respectively. We
do not continue to increase the number of variables because it is
enough to consider the relationship among six variables in most
situations. The result is normalized by max–min normalization
method. As shown in Fig. 2, the value of original definition is
proportional to accumulation method. This paper aims at max-
imizing the MI between nodes with least information among all
the nodes, which will not be affected but replacing the parameters
for proportional relationship. As a consequence, although there is
no close-form formula for completely computing multi-variable
MI, it still can be approximated based on the following inequality:
X
N
MIðX; 〈Y 1 ; Y 2 ; …; Y n 〉Þ Z MIðX; Y i Þ
i¼1
3.3. Distribution of road traffic speed
In MI calculation, we should know the distribution of traffic state
(p(x)) at first. In this paper, road traffic speed (RTS) is applied to
denote the traffic state instead of the travel time or other measures,
because speed is irrelevant to the section length and can be
conveniently changed into any other quantities (travel time, density,
etc.). Several researchers have found that the RTS fits the Gaussian
(normal) distribution, such as in [45,46]. Fig. 3 shows that the
histograms of RTS on four roads from 6:00 to 22:00 with the interval
1 km/h. In the exploration of the speed datasets, we noticed that it is
a distribution with multi-peaks, which fits the multimodal distribu-
tion. The Gaussian mixture distribution or Gaussian mixture model
(GMM) is often used to describe, at least approximately, any set of
correlated real-valued random variables each of which clusters
around a mean value [47]. It is an extension of Gaussian distribution.
Thus, it is applied to fit the RTS distribution in urban road.
A GMM (order¼M) is a weighted sum of M Gaussian compo-
nents, which is defined as
X
M
pðxj λÞ ¼ wi gðxj μi ; Σ i Þ
i¼1
where x is a D dimensional vector (D ¼1 for RTS), wi are the
PM
mixture weights satisfying the constraint that i ¼ 1 wi ¼ 1. The
137
gðxj μi ; Σ i Þ are the Gaussian components:
( )
  1 1 0 X
1  
g xj μi ; Σ i ¼

1=2 exp  x  μ i x  μi ð6Þ
ð2π ÞD=2
Σ i
2 i
 
with mean μi and covariance matrix ðΣ i Þ
The GMM is parameterized by order, mean, covariance matrix
and mixture weights.
 These parameters are collectively repre-
sented by λ ¼ M; wi ; μi ; Σ i , which can be estimated by training.
The training process is to find the best parameters to match the
distribution of the training data. There are several techniques
available for estimating the parameters of a GMM. By far the most
popular and well-established method is the Expectation Max-
imum (EM) algorithm [48]. Before using EM, M should be deter-
mined. The details will be discussed in the experiments. It is an
iterative method. The initial λ0 is often derived by K-Means. In
each iteration of EM, letting λi be the initial parameter and
estimate a new model λi þ 1 to get pðX j λi þ 1 Þ ZpðX j λÞ.
3.4. MCMC for MI estimation
For MI calculation, there is a double integration in (2) which
has no analytical solution for GMM. However, double integration
can be transformed into double sum through discrete method
which is defined as follows:
XX  
pðx; yÞ
MIðX; YÞ ¼ pðx; yÞlog ð7Þ
x A Xy A Y
pðxÞpðyÞ
If the number of samples (X and Y) is big enough, the result will be
very close to the real value. However, the number of samples is not
usually satisfied.
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a family of procedures for
Bayesian computations. The basic idea is to draw random samples
from a Markov chain, whose equilibrium distribution is the target
distribution. Markov chain stands for a sequence of random variables
in which the distribution of each element or variable depends on its
previous variable value. These samples are then used to approximate
ð4Þ
the desired sampling. Gibbs sampling is a MCMC algorithm for
obtaining a sequence of observations which are approximated from
a specified joint probability distribution [49]. This sequence can be
used to approximate  the joint  distribution like pðx; yÞ. Let
π ðxÞ ¼ π ðx1 ; …; xk Þ x A Rn ; 1 o k o n denote

the target density,
where, for i ¼ 1; …; k; xi ¼ xi;1 ; …; xi;nðiÞ ðnðiÞ Z1Þ and xi;j are scalar
components of x. π ðxi j x  i Þ is the induced conditional densities for
each component
  sub-vectors xi, given values of the other components
x  i ¼ xj ; j a i ði ¼ 1; …; kÞ. The Gibbs sampling algorithm proceeds
 
as follows: firstly, set arbitrary initial values x0 ¼ x01 ; …; x0k , then,
successively make random variate drawings from each of π ðxi j x  i Þ. t
 
is a transition mechanism from x0 to x1 ¼ x11 ; …; x1k . Iteration of this
process generates a sequence x ; x ; …; x ; … . The samples will
0 1 t
approximate the joint distribution of all variables. In this paper, we
employ Gibbs sampling algorithm to jointly estimate the MI.
4. Location method
This section presents an approach to the sensor location
problem for optimizing traffic state estimation based on TSN by
the idea of greedy algorithm, consisting of problem analysis and
method description. The focus of this approach is to solve the
sensor location problem with a limited number of sensors.
ð5Þ
4.1. Problem analysis
Before analysis the complexity of the location problem on
TSNM, two well-known problems need to be introduced:
138 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
Fig. 3. The histogram (blue solid line) of road traffic speed of four typical road sections and the distribution (red dotted line) by 2-order GMM. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure caption, the reader is referred to the web version of this paper.)
minimum dominating set problem and maximum edge dominat-
ing set problem [50].
In an unweight undirected graph (G ¼ ðV; EÞ), the objective of
dominating set problem is to find a set V n , V n D V, if 8 vi A V  V n ,
(vj A V n makes that ðvi ; vj Þ A E. The result Vn is a dominating set of G.
The location problem can be concluded into a dominating set problem
on the assumption that the state of uninstalled nodes can be perfectly
estimated while it is connected with an installed one. According to this
assumption, all weights are equal. The aim of location method turns to
minimize the dominating set jV n j . It is a minimum dominating set
problem that is NP-hard. It indicates that the location problem is as
hard as the minimum dominating set problem.
The objective of maximum edge dominating set problem is to
find a set Vn, V n A V, if 8 ei;j A E, that vi A V  V n and vj A V n . It is also
an NP-hard problem. We assume that the location problem is to
select more edges connected with installed nodes so as to make
the whole network to obtain more information. The
objective

state of the installed roads can be perfectly estimated.
becomes to include all edges in the set with minimal
V n
. In this
situation, the problem can be viewed as a maximum edge
dominating set problem.
According to the above analysis, the solution of minimum
dominating set problem and maximum edge dominating set pro-
blem is a subset of the location problem. If the location problem is
not a NP-hard problem, so is the minimum dominating set problem
and maximum edge dominating set problem. Thus, the location
problem is an NP-hard problem. In application, it is impossible to
build TSN from real data to satisfy the above assumption. It will take
more computational time than solving minimum dominating set
problem and maximum edge dominating set problem.
In an urban area, there are tens of thousands of road sections that
can be placed sensors on, for example more than 1432 in Hangzhou.
Thus, it is time-consuming to adopt the exhaustive method to solve
the location problem. The idea of greedy algorithm is to find a global
optimum by following the problem solving heuristic of making the
locally optimal choice at each stage. A greedy heuristic may yield
locally optimal solutions. Nonetheless, it approximates a global
optimal solution in a reasonable time [51]. Thus, a method based
on greedy algorithm is proposed to solve the location problem. It is
based on traffic state network so is named TSN method.
4.2. Method description
The process of the TSN method is shown in the pseudo-code
below, where the set (Vn) of installed nodes is initialized by empty set.
If some roads have installed sensors or some roads must install sensor,
the D is not empty at the beginning. In the pseudo-code, weightðvi ; vj Þ
denotes the weight between node vi and vj. The variable coveredi is
true if Vn contains vi. The variable infoSendi denotes the sum of
information that node vi sends to the connected nodes when it is
installed. The variable infoReceivei denotes the sum of information that
node vi receives from other installed nodes. If the node vi is installed,
infoReceivei is infinite (INFI) because of the assumption that the traffic
The TSN is an iterative method to iteratively augment the mini-
mum received information. In each iteration, the best case is that a
node is added to V n which would send the maximal information to
uninstalled nodes and have received the minimal information. This
case often appears at the beginning of the process while most nodes
are uninstalled. If no nodes meet this condition, the node that receives
the minimal information is added to guarantee obtaining enough
information. If more than one node satisfies the condition, the node to
be added is chosen randomly from the eligible nodes.
If the number of sensors to be installed is n, it can be checked
that each call to ChooseVertex and AdjustInfo takes n times. Using
an adjacency list to implement the graph structure, the total time
spent in AdjustInfo throughout execution of the algorithm is O(m),
where m{n and m is the average degree of the graph. In
ChooseVertex, a list is used to store infoSendi and infoReceivei, in
descending order and is updated immediately when changed,
whose complexity is O(m). Thus the total complexity of the
algorithm is OðnnmÞ r Oðn2 Þ.
ChooseVertex (Vector infoSend, Vector infoReceive)
 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
Algorithm 1.
1. MS¼ arg max1 r i r n infoSendi
2. MR¼ arg max1 r i r n infoReceivei
3. M ¼ MS⋂MR
4. if M ¼ ∅
5. return element of MR chosen uniformly at random.
6. else
7. return element of M chosen uniformly at random.
AdjustInfo(Vector covered, Vector infoReceive, Vector infoSend,
Vertex vi).
Algorithm 2.
1. coveredi ¼ true
2. infoReceivei ¼ INFI; infoSendi ¼ 0
3. for each neighbor vj of vi that coveredj ¼ false
4. infoSendj ¼ infoSendj  weightðvi ; vj Þ
5. infoReceivej ¼ infoReceivej þ weightðvi ; vj Þ
Greedy(Graph G).
Algorithm 3.
1. V n ¼ ∅;
2. For all nodes vi
3. infoSendi ¼sum(weight
(vi ; vj ÞÞ // vj is the neighbors of vj i
4. infoReceivei ¼ 0
5. coveredi ¼ false
6. while 1 to n
7. v ¼ChooseVertex(infoSend, infoReceive)
8. if v ¼  1
9. add v to V n
10. AdjustInfo(covered, infoSend, infoReceive, v)
11. return V n
5. Performance evaluation
5.1. Experimental setup
The experiments were carried out on the GPS data collected from
8007 GPS-equipped taxis traveling in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province,
China, from September 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013. It covers core area of
the city as shown in Fig. 4. This area has 1432 road sections including
358 arterial roads and 1074 collector roads. The different directions in
one section are treated as two different sections. The travel purpose
is usual different between weekends (including legal holiday) and
workdays, which will lead to the difference of traffic state distribu-
tion. It is more important to acquire the traffic state in workdays, and
we only applied the data of these days. Besides, as vehicles in the
middle night and early morning are pretty few, the data in this time
period is also ignored. In summary, the data in 197 days from
Monday to Friday during 6:00 to 22:00 is applied in our experiments.
The data volume is more than 712 GB.
The upload frequency of GPS equipment is set at 20 s. Based on the
GPS data, the RTS is calculated using the estimation method as described
in [13]. In an interval, the processing includes four steps: at first, a
coordinate transforming is operated to change the WGS-84 3-D
coordinates to a GIS-T map; second, the original points of roads are
matched onto the roads of the map by “Point-Arc” approach; third, the
sample set on each link or road segment is approximated by least square
method; finally, the RTS is calculated by the traveled distance dividing
139
the elapsed time. Considering smoothness and stability, the interval time
is set at 15 min [52]. It contains 64 points of RTS data in one day.
The process of building a TSN is as follows: at first, the collected
GPS data is used to estimate the RTS for all 1432 road sections;
secondly, the RTS distribution (GMM) of each section is trained by EM.
The order of GMM is set according to the experimental requirement;
then, MCMC is applied to calculate the MI between each pair of road
sections. The total number of pairs is 1432n1431; finally, the TSN is
composed of 1432 nodes, 1432n1432 edges, and the weight is the MI.
After building the TSN, the greedy algorithm based location method is
applied to find a limited number of sections to locate sensors.
5.2. GMM parameters estimation
5.2.1. Model order
In MI calculation, the order of each GMM should be set at the
same value to ensure the comparability. It is essential to determine
the order at first. Firstly, the order of GMM for each section was
calculated based on Akaike information criterion (AIC). Then, their
distribution was counted as shown in Fig. 5. It indicates that it is big
enough to set the order at 2 for most sections (4 96%). The reason
may be that the RTS of most sections tends to change around a fixed
value, even in the complex situation. Most of them contain less than
3 peaks. The fitting results of the typical distributions by GMM are
shown in Fig. 3 (blue dotted line). It further illustrates that the 2-
order model can accurately describe the RTS distribution. Thus, the
GMM (order¼2) was adopted in the following experiments.
5.2.2. Training data
We proposed to apply large-scale data to solve location
problem. Some cities may have few GPS-equipped probe vehicles
and the GPS data is limited. It will spend massively to collect GPS
data in these cities. Thus, it is important to reveal how much data
is enough to train the GMM. For a 1-dimension 2-order GMM, the
number of uncertain parameters is 3n2 ¼6. Ideally, it only needs
6 points to calculate the parameter. In reality, the number of data
points must be far more than 6 in order to ensure the accuracy. We
determined the base line through the following experiments.
The experiment employed the data from 36 sections in 60 days
with the missing rate below 5%. At first, the GMMN was trained
using N days data, where N ¼ 1; 2; …; 40. It trained 40 GMM for
each section. Here, the number of days is the data volume for
training. Then, the difference between GMMN and GMM40 was
estimated by Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD). In probability
theory and information theory, the KLD is often used in measure
the difference between two probability distributions [53]. For
distributions p(x) and q(x), KLD is defined as
Z 1  
pðxÞ
DKL ðpðxÞ J qðxÞÞ ¼ ln pðxÞ dx ð8Þ
þ1 qðxÞ
In order to maintain symmetric, it was calculated as
KLD0 ðpðxÞ; qðxÞÞ ¼ DKL ðpðxÞ J qðxÞÞ þ DKL ðqðxÞ J pðxÞÞ ð9Þ
There is an indefinite integral in KLD calculation. It can be turned
to a summation and calculated by Gibbs sampling [49].
The experimental result for different days is shown in Fig. 6, where
the yellow (red and blue) line is the minimum (maximum and average)
value of KDL. It shows that the average KDL does not obviously
decrease with the data increasing, when N Z 7. It means that 7-days
is enough for most sections. The reason may be that the distribution of
RTS is almost the same in different 7 days which contains sufficient
information for model training. Considering the cost of data collection,
7-days data can be set as the base line. In addition, the maximum KLD
is very close to the average value when N 4 15, which indicates 15-
days data performs well in the worst situation. Thus, 15-days data is
appropriate for precisely GMM training.
140 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
Fig. 4. The core area for sensor locations experiments in Hangzhou. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of
this paper.)
Fig. 5. The distribution of GMM order estimated by AIC.
5.2.3. Missing rate
The taxis are unevenly distributed and their number is limited,
so that the GPS data may not cover the whole network in a certain
time period. If the missing data is critical to depict the shape of the
distribution, it will affect the accuracy of model training. The
missing rate is usually used to express the missing degree, which
is defined as the ratio of missing times with total time intervals.
According to this definition, the average missing rate is 27.3% in
our dataset and 15.8% in the arterial sections. Though EM algo-
rithm is helpful in data missing situation, we still do not know
how much missing rate it can be tolerant. Thus, it is necessary to
analyze the influence of data missing.
The experimental data is collected from 36 sections in 15 days,
which is the same as in the training data experiment. At first, we
trained GMMR using the data of different missing rates
(R ¼ ½5%; 10%; 15%; …60%). Each section has 12 model parameters.
Assuming the missing data follows the uniform distribution, we
randomly removed the data to reach the certain missing rate. Then,
we compared the GMM R ¼ 5% with other 12 models by KLD. The
average KLD of all sections is shown in Fig. 7. We found that the
models have small differences while R r 35%. It means that the data
with R r 35% can train the GMM parameters accurately, which can
be satisfied by the most sections in the dataset. While the missing
rate rises higher (R 4 35%), the difference increases faster and the
data missing affects the trained parameters. The model trained from
these data is unable to reflect the real distribution. Combined
with the results in the training data experiment, it summarizes
that the RTS model should be trained from the data with N Z 15
and R r 35%. This is an analysis result on a certain dataset.
And the required data might be different in other urban networks.
Fig. 6. The difference of GMMs trained using the data collected from different days.
The x-axis denotes the number (N) of days for GMM training, and the y-axis
denotes the KLD between GMM 40 and GMMN . (For interpretation of the references
to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this paper.)
However, the base line can be analyzed by the same experimental
processing.
5.3. MI performance
The performance of MI was evaluated in a comparison experi-
ment. We selected 6 sections as shown in Fig. 8. It is a represen-
tative sample in urban networks. The MI between each section is
calculated and shown in Table 1. As shown in Table 1, MIðRS3 ; RS2 Þ
and MIðRS3 ; RS4 Þ are bigger than MIðRS3 ; RS1 Þ and MIðRS3 ; RS5 Þ. It
means that RS3 can receive more information from RS2 =RS5 than
RS4 =RS1 . Here, RS2 links with RS3 and RS4 is in the next intersec-
tion. The result fits the observations that it has a great possibility
of the similar RTS distribution when two sections are linked. Thus,
it is suitable to apply MI for received information estimation.
RS6 is far away from RS3. It seems no link in traffic state between
them. But MIðRS3 ; RS6 Þ is almost the same as MIðRS3 ; RS2 Þ. Fig. 9
shows the RTS variation of RS3, RS6 and RS1 from 6:00 to 22:00 in one
day. The curve of RS3 and RS6 is similar. And the two sections have
the similar rush hour in the morning (7:45–9:45) and afternoon
(16:00–19:00). It means that send enough information to RS1 for
traffic state estimation and the RTS of RS1 can be estimated from the
 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143 141

Table 1
The MI between different road sections.

RS2 RS3 RS4 RS5 RS6

RS1 1:80n10  4 1:75n10  4 1:05n10  4 4:52n10  5 6:65n10  5

RS2 – 6:20n10  2 7:7n10  2 4:38n10  4 1:61n10  2
RS3 – – 1:21n10  3 6:32n10  4 4:01n10  3
RS4 – – – 2:87n10  2 7:89n10  3
RS5 – – – – 9:68n10  4

Fig. 7. The difference of GMM trained with the missing rate from 5% to 60%.

Fig. 9. The change curve of road traffic speed from 6:00 to 22:00 in October
18, 2012.

the high cover rate (C Z50%). However, low cover rate is often
encountered in real application with cost limitation. In summary, the
greedy method is capable of finding an effective set of TSN to space
Fig. 8. The location of six road sections in MI performance evaluation. sensors, and ensures maximizing the minimum received information.

data obtained from RS6. As a consequence, MI performs as expected
for calculating the RTS relationship between different sections.
5.4. Sensor location result
In sensor location experiments, the TSN method was compared
with exhaustion location road method (ELRM), random road loca-
tion method (RRLM) and arterial road location method (ARLM).
ELRD finds the location set by exhaustion method, which shows the
best result on TSN model. RRLM randomly selects sections to space
sensors. In the experiments, we run it for ten times and calculate
the average value in order to reduce the random error. In ARLM, the
sections are divided into different levels by the concern degree. In
ARLM, the sensors are located on the highest level (most con-
cerned) at first. In the same level, RRLM is applied. Then, if there are
remaining sensors, the sections in the next level are considered till
all sensors are spaced. In this experiment, all 1432 sections are
divided into two levels: arterial section and collector section.
Arterial sections (yellow colored and wider as shown in Fig. 4) are
the skeleton of urban road network with high-capacity. Most
drivers concern the traffic state of this type of sections.
All data in the dataset is applied in the experiment. The perfor-
mance is evaluated by the total received information with different
cover rate (C ¼ ½10%; 20%; …; 70%). The result is shown in Fig. 9,
where x-axis donates the cover rate and y-axis donates the ratio of TSN
with ELRM, RRLM and ARLM. It shows that TSN is much better than
RRLM and ARLM. TSN is more effective in maximizing the received
information than RRLM and ARLM. The ELRM performs better than
TSN. The ELRM is about 1.2 times as TSN, which is far less than the
difference of RRLM and ARLM. It means that the local optimum result
by greedy method is very close to the best option. The superiority of
TSN decreases with the increasing of cover rate. The received informa-
tion of RRLM/ARLM is almost the same with TSN, when C Z
40%=C Z 50%. It hits that the location problem can be ignored in
5.5. Traffic speed estimation
Three experiments were designed to evaluate the perfor-
mance of TSN in RTS estimation. It was compared with RRLM
and ARLM. At first, the location method is applied to determine
the sensors space, when C ¼ 10%. Then, the RTS of the uncovered
sections is calculated by historical average method (HAM),
linked road average method (LRAM) and spatial correlation
method (SCM) respectively. HAM adopts the average of RTS at
the same time interval of previous 5 days to estimate the current
missing data [16]. It does not apply the real-time data from
sensors. In LRAM, the missing data is estimated by the average
RTS of linked sections. If all linked section is uninstalled sensors
(n ¼0), the RTS is estimated by HAM. In SCM, the missing data is
estimated by n sections with the highest correlations [18], where
the upper limit of n is set at 6. Finally, the root mean square error
(RMSE) is applied to evaluate the estimate error [54], which is
defined as
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u d
uX
RMSE ¼ t ðvbi  vi Þ2 =d ð10Þ
i¼1
where d is the total testing time and vi =v bi is the true value/
estimate of RTS respectively. Here, the result estimated by the
GPS data is treated as the true value.
The result of RTS estimation experiments is shown in Table 2.
We found that: (1) the average RMSE of TSN (3.87) is lower than
ARLM (5.02) and RRLM (6.48). In SCM, the RMSE is reduced 26.3%
(ARLM) and 46.1% (RRLM) respectively. It indicates that the model
estimated based on the large-scale GPS data is effective in sensor
location for traffic speed (state) estimation; (2) in both of SCM and
LRAM, TSN outperforms than RRLM and ARLM. It means that the
improvement of our method is not related to the missing data
estimation method to some extent; (3) SCM and LRAM have a
142 Z. Shan, Q. Zhu / Neurocomputing 169 (2015) 134–143
Table 2
The result (RMSE) of road traffic speed estimation with traffic state network (TSN),
random road location method (RRLM) and arterial road location method (ARLM).
The missing data is calculated by historical average method (HAM), linked road
average method (LRAM) and spatial correlation method (SCM) respectively.
HAM SCM LRAM Average
TSN 6.89 3.34 4.40 3.87
ARLM 6.89 4.53 5.50 5.02
RRLM 6.89 6.20 6.75 6.48
Average 6.89 4.69 5.55
Fig. 10. The sensor location performance of traffic state network (TSN), exhaustion
location road method (ELRM), random road location method (RRLM) and arterial
road location method (ARLM) with different cover rate.
better performance than HAM in the three location method,
because HAM does not apply the real-time data from sensors.
TSN is the best of three location methods. ARLM performs better
than RRLM in both SCM and LRAM. The RMSE is reduced 28.9% and
18.5% respectively. Their sort order fits the result of received
information as shown in Fig. 10. These two results indicate that
it is helpful for traffic speed estimation to obtain more information
and the assumption of TSN is reasonable.
6. Conclusion and future work
As more and more attention is cast on road speed estimation, this
paper presented a camera location method which aims to maximize
the information gaining from a set of located nodes in an urban
network. In our method, traffic network is transformed to the
undirected weighted graph, where road sections are abstracted to
the node and MI is applied to define the weight. And the optimum
problem is transformed to a graph problem similar to the dominant
set problem. The GMM is applied for modeling the distribution of the
RTS, and its order and data for training are determined in the
experiments. Then, a TSN based algorithm is proposed to solve the
optimum problem in a linear complexity. In the experiments, we apply
the GPS data from the real urban road to demonstrate the validity of
the method step by step. The experiments show that (1) the GMM and
MI is fit for describing the distribution of RTS and calculating the
weight of model respectively; (2) our location is effective in maximiz-
ing the minimum received information; (3) the large-scale data is
helpful to locate cameras for traffic speed (state) estimation.
Our ongoing research includes several major directions. First, this
study only focuses on the sensor design problem for speed demand
estimation applications, and a natural extension is to assist sensor
design decisions for other network wide traffic state estimation
domains, such as measuring and forecasting OD, travel times, path
flows, and route delays. Second, the proposed model is specifically
designed for maximizing the performance of speed estimation with
finite number of cameras, and our future work should consider other
crucial factors for real-world camera network design, such as how and
where to locate cameras on the road for performance requirement.
Acknowledgment
This paper draws on work supported in part by the following
funds: National High Technology Research and Development Pro-
gram of China (863 Program) under Grant number 2011AA010101,
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant numbers
61002009 and 61304188, Key Science and Technology Program of
Zhejiang Province of China under Grant number 2012C01035-1, and
Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant numbers LZ13F020004 and LR14F020003.
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