%0 Journal Article
%T You Take Care of the Drive, I Take Care of the Rule: A Traffic-Rule Awareness System Using Vehicular Sensors and Mobile Phones
%A Xing Zhang
%A Jidong Zhao
%A Jinchuan Tang
%A Bang Liu
%J International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/319276
%X Traffic rules are used to regulate drivers¡¯ behaviours in modern traffic systems. In fact, all driving behaviours are presented by vehicles¡¯ behaviours. If vehicles have awareness of their behaviours, it is possible that traffic rules are able to regulate vehicles instead of drivers. There are three advantages of vehicle regulation: (1) without worrying about violations of traffic rules and searching for traffic signs, drivers can pay more attention on emergency situations, such as jaywalking. (2) Many traffic violations are due to attention distraction; machines do not have the attention issues; therefore they can provide good traffic-rule obeying. (3) New traffic rules can be spread and applied more quickly and effectively through the Internet or Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs). In this paper, we propose a novel traffic-rule awareness system using vehicular sensors and mobile phones. It translates traffic rules into combinations of vehicular sensors, GPS device, and Geography Information System (GIS); the system can tell whether a driver violates the traffic rules and help him to amend his driving behaviour immediately. Experiments in real driving environments show that our system can be aware of the traffic rules accurately and immediately. 1. Introduction During the year 2011, there were 11856 traffic accidents that happened in Sichuan province of China and 95% of the accidents are caused by traffic violations [1]. If traffic-violation rate can be significantly decreased, a lot of lives can be saved from traffic accidents. In fact, most traffic violations are not on purpose; the reason of high traffic-violation rate is that the traffic rules are designed to regulate drivers¡¯ behaviours. As long as drivers are human beings, they will suffer from memory issues and attention distraction. Their memory and concentration will be severely affected by mood, alcohol, drugs, and environment. Even a short conversation during driving will distract drivers and cause unnecessary traffic violations. Google self-driving car [2] is a good attempt to decrease the traffic-violation rate, because machines do not have the memory and concentration issues like humans. However, google self-driving car only focuses on self-driving; it has not yet taken traffic rules into consideration except for traffic lights. Some other works like [3] monitor dangerous driving behaviours like aggressive turns, acceleration, and braking and help drivers to correct these unsafe behaviours. However, they did not take traffic rules into consideration. Actually, even if driving behaviours
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijdsn/2012/319276/