Detecting School Zones on Florida's Public Roadways Using Aerial Images and Artificial Intelligence (AI2)

Collecting up-to-date roadway geometry data is essential for transportation agencies so they can undertake planning, maintenance, design, and rehabilitation of roadways. Collection methods can be categorized into two distinct groups: land-based methods (e.g., field inventories, mobile mapping, and image logging); and aerial-based methods (e.g., satellite imagery, drones, and laser scanning). Because using land-based methods for thousands of miles of highways is tedious, costly, and risky for crew members, there is a need to develop better methodologies to collect these data faster, and more safely and cheaply. The increasing availability of high-resolution images and recent advances in computer vision and object detection techniques have enabled the automated extraction of roadway geometry features. This novel study proposes a computer vision-based methodology to detect school zone pavement markings from high-resolution aerial images and determine school zones on Florida's public roadways. This is critical information for transportation agencies, and they use it for a variety of different purposes: identifying those markings that are old and invisible; comparing the school zone locations with other geometric features such as crosswalks; and analyzing crashes that occur around the zones. Compared with the ground truth data obtained for Leon County, Florida, 94% accuracy was observed at the 90% confidence level. The model was then used to detect school zones in Orange County, Florida, and approximately 500 school zone markings were identified automatically. The road geometry data extracted can be integrated with crash and traffic data to advise policymakers and roadway users.