Abstract

Accurate traffic data is crucial for a range of different applications such as quantifying vehicle emissions, and transportation planning and management. However, the availability of traffic data is geographically fragmented and is rarely held in an accessible form. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a common approach to developing large urban traffic data sets. Utilising satellite data to estimate traffic data offers a cost-effective and standardized alternative to ground-based traffic monitoring. This study used high-resolution satellite imagery (WorldView-2 and 3) and Deep Learning (DL) to identify vehicles, road by road, in Barcelona (2017–2019). The You Only Look Once (YOLOv3) object detection model was trained and model accuracy was investigated via parameters such as training data set specific anchor boxes, network resolution, image colour band composition and input image size. The best performing vehicle detection model configuration had a precision (proportion of positive detections that were correct) of 0.69 and a recall (proportion of objects in the image correctly identified) of 0.79. We demonstrated that high-resolution satellite imagery and object detection models can be utilised to identify vehicles at a city scale. However, the approach highlights challenges relating to identifying vehicles on narrow roads, in shadow, under vegetation, and obstructed by buildings. This is the first time that DL has been used to identify vehicles at a city scale and demonstrates the possibility of applying these methods to cities globally where data are often unavailable.