A single node vehicle detection system using an adaptive signal adjustment technique

Vehicle detection is essential to build intelligent transportation systems, estimating vehicle speed and traffic congestion, and providing various services such as parking assist and route guidance systems, etc. Many approaches have been reported based on various sensors and technologies such as inductive loop detector, radar, and CCD camera, wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a single node vehicle detection and speed estimation system using geomagnetic sensors with wireless sensor networks is presented. In the proposed system, two geomagnetic sensors are installed, separated by 20 cm within a single board, and a novel adaptive signal adjusting algorithm followed by a simplified cross-correlation technique is applied, calculating the similarity of signals from the two magnetic sensors. According to our simulations, the proposed system shows over 97 percent accuracy for vehicle speed estimation.