Monitoring traffic

Abstract

There is described a method of estimating one or more properties of traffic passing along segments of a road network, the traffic comprising a plurality of vehicles. The method comprises receiving, from a radio navigation receiver located at each vehicle of a subset of the vehicles, one or more first properties of each of those vehicles. The method also comprises using distributed acoustic sensing to generate, as a function of time and of position along a subset of the segments of the road network, signals representing acoustic vibration caused by the traffic at one or more sensing optical fibres that extend along the subset of segments. The signals representing acoustic vibration caused by the traffic are then used to determine one or more second properties of the traffic in the subset of segments, and the received first properties of the vehicles in the subset of vehicles are combined with the determined second properties of the traffic in the subset of segments, to estimate one or more third properties of the traffic.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.