Scalable Dynamic Origin-Destination Demand Estimation Enhanced by High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable framework for dynamic origin-destination demand estimation that integrates high-resolution satellite imagery with traditional traffic data, improving accuracy especially on unmonitored links.

Contribution

It develops a novel computer vision pipeline and a graph-based estimation framework that jointly utilize satellite imagery and sensor data for enhanced traffic demand estimation.

Findings

Satellite imagery significantly improves estimation accuracy.

The framework performs well on large-scale real-world networks.

Supplementing traditional data with satellite info enhances coverage.

Abstract

This study presents a novel integrated framework for dynamic origin-destination demand estimation (DODE) in multi-class mesoscopic network models, incorporating high-resolution satellite imagery together with conventional traffic data from local sensors. Unlike sparse local detectors, satellite imagery offers consistent, city-wide road and traffic information of both parking and moving vehicles, overcoming data availability limitations. To extract information from imagery data, we design a computer vision pipeline for class-specific vehicle detection and map matching, generating link-level traffic density observations by vehicle class. Building upon this information, we formulate a computational graph-based DODE framework that calibrates dynamic network states by jointly matching observed traffic counts/speeds from local sensors with density measurements derived from satellite imagery. To assess the accuracy and robustness of the proposed framework, we conduct a series of numerical experiments using both synthetic and real-world data. The results demonstrate that supplementing traditional data with satellite-derived density significantly improves estimation performance, especially for links without local sensors. Real-world experiments also show the framework's potential for practical deployment on large-scale networks. Sensitivity analysis further evaluates the impact of data quality related to satellite imagery data.