BaroSense: Using Barometer for Road Traffic Congestion Detection and Path Estimation with Crowdsourcing

Traffic congestion on urban roadways is a serious problem requiring novel ways to detect and mitigate it. Determining the routes that lead to the traffic congestion segment is also vital in devising mitigation strategies. Further, crowdsourcing this information allows for use of these strategies quickly and in places where infrastructure is not available. In this work, we present an unconventional method, using the barometer sensor of mobile phones to (a) detect road traffic congestion and (b) estimate the paths that lead to the congested road segment. We make the observation that roads are not completely flat and very often, altitude varies along the road. The barometer sensor chips are sensitive enough to measure these variations and consume very little energy of the mobile phone, compared to other sensors such as the GPS or accelerometer. We devise a feature set to map the rate of change of this altitude as the user moves into activities characterized as “still” and “motion,” which are further used by the traffic congestion detection algorithm (RoadSphygmo) to classify the group of users as being in “moving,” “congestion,”  or “stuck” states. To estimate the paths that lead to the congested road segment, we compare the user’s barometer sensor readings with a pre-stored road signature of barometer values using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). We show that by using correlation of barometer sensor values, we can determine if users are in the same vehicle. We crowdsource this information from multiple mobile phones and use majority voting technique to improve the accuracy of traffic congestion detection and path estimation. We find a significant increase in the accuracies using crowdsourced information as compared to individual mobile phones. Further, we show that we can use barometer sensor for other applications such as bus occupancy, boarding/deboarding of a vehicle, and so on. The validation of the state determined by RoadSphygmo is done by comparing it with average GPS speed calculated during the same time period. The path estimation is validated over different intersections and considering various cases of commuter travel. The results obtained are promising and show that the traffic state determination and the estimation of the path taken by the commuter can achieve high accuracy.