IoT based monitoring of air quality and traffic using regression analysis

Dynamic traffic management (DTM) systems are used to reduce the negative externalities of traffic congestion, such as air pollution in urban areas. They require traffic and environmental monitoring infrastructures. In this paper we present a prototype of a low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) system for monitoring traffic flow and the Air Quality Index (AQI). The computation of the traffic flows is based on processing video in the compressed domain. Only using motion vectors as input, traffic flow is computed in real-time over an embedded architecture. An estimation of the AQI is supported by machine learning regression techniques, using different feature data obtained from the IoT device. These automatic learning techniques overcome the need for complex calibration and other limitations of embedded devices in making the needed measurements of the pollutant gases for the computation of the actual AQI. The experimentation with the data obtained from different cities representing different scenarios with a variety of climate and traffic conditions, allows validating the proposed architecture. As regressors, Linear Regression (LR), Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Random Forest (RF) are compared using the performance metrics R2, MSE, MAE and MRE resulting in a relevant improvement of the AQI estimations of our proposal.