An adaptive traffic lights system using machine learning

Traffic congestion is a major problem in many cities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as in most countries. The rapidly increase of vehicles and dealing with the fixed infrastructure have caused traffic congestion. One of the main problems is that the current infrastructure cannot be expanded further. Therefore, there is a need to make the system work differently with more sophistication to manage the traffic better, rather than creating a new infrastructure. In this research, a new adaptive traffic lights system is proposed to determine vehicles type, calculate the number of vehicles in a traffic junction using patterns detection methods, and suggest the necessary time for each side of the traffic junction using machine learning tools. In this context, the contributions of this paper are: (a) creating a new image-based dataset for vehicles, (b) proposing a new time management formula for traffic lights, and (c) providing literature of many studies that contributed to the development of the traffic lights system in the past decade. For training the vehicle detector, we have created an image-based dataset related to our work and contains images for traffic. We utilized Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN), Fast Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks (Fast R-CNN), Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks (Faster R-CNN), Single Shot Detector (SSD), and You Only Look Once v4 (YOLO v4) deep learning algorithms to train the model and obtain the suggested mathematical formula to the required process and give the appropriate timeslot for every junction. For evaluation, we used the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric. The obtained results were as follows: 78.2%, 71%, 75.2%, 79.8%, and 86.4% for SSD, R-CNN, Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN, and YOLO v4, respectively. Based on our experimental results, it is found that YOLO v4 achieved the highest mAP of the identification of vehicles with (86.4%) mAP. For time division (the junctions timeslot), we proposed a formula that reduces about 10% of the waiting time for vehicles.