SatTrafikk Project report 2011

The SatTrafikk project is a research project conducted by the Norwegian Computing Center and funded by the Norwegian Space Centre and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, where the main objective is to develop a future system for automated road traffic counts from satellite imagery. The project was started in 2007 as a follow-on to the European Space Agency project “Road Traffic Snapshot” (2006-2007), which demonstrated the feasibiliy of this kind of vehicle detection. In order to apply the SatTrafikk vehicle detection software in operational scenarios, several key components must work together. Up until 2010, modules for the detection of roads, vehicles, and clouds and cloud shadows, were separately developed. In 2011 we have integrated these modules into a processing chain with the aim of operationalizing the derivation of traffic statistics from satellite imagery. In this report we describe the newest methodological improvements and expansions of the automatic detection algorithms. The entire processing chain has been validated on five QuickBird and WorldView-2 scenes from Mid- and Northern Norway, with satisfactory results.