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The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) recently initiated a three-year program named DIRECT, which stands for Driver Information Radio Experimenting with Communication Technologies. The DIRECT Project has been designed specifically to test, in an operational setting, alternative driver-information systems. DIRECT is being undertaken as a national IVHS operational field test and is funded through a public/private partnership between FHWA (50%), MDOT (25%), and several automobile and electronic component manufacturers (25%). This paper describes the system, starting from the initial decisions on the project concept through the physical and experimental design concepts.

Real-time video of traffic scenes contain a wealth of information not available from conventional point detectors. In addition to the instantaneous, wide-area coverage provided by image data, image sequences capture the dynamic aspects of the traffic. Initially, researchers concentrated on minimizing hardware complexity, and thus cost, at the expense of sophisticated algorithms that could more fully exploit the information inherent in image data. If image data could be processed in real-time to produce a track file for each object of interest, then the traffic flow through the scene would be fully characterized for traffic management purposes. This paper presents the status of work in process at the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) to develop real-time image processing algorithms for detecting and tracking vehicles in actual traffic settings.