An amalgamation of YOLOv4 and XGBoost for next-gen smart traffic management system

The traffic congestion and the rise in the number of vehicles have become a grievous issue, and it is focused worldwide. One of the issues with traffic management is that the traffic light’s timer is not dynamic. As a result, one has to remain longer even if there are no or fewer vehicles, on a roadway, causing unnecessary waiting time, fuel consumption and leads to pollution. Prior work on smart traffic management systems repurposes the use of Internet of things, Time Series Forecasting, and Digital Image Processing. Computer Vision-based smart traffic management is an emerging area of research. Therefore a real-time traffic light optimization algorithm that uses Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques to predict the optimal time required by the vehicles to clear the lane is presented. This article concentrates on a two-step approach. The first step is to obtain the count of the independent category of the class of vehicles. For this, the You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) object detection technique is employed. In the second step, an ensemble technique named eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) for predicting the optimal time of the green light window is implemented. Furthermore, the different implemented versions of YOLO and different prediction algorithms are compared with the proposed approach. The experimental analysis signifies that YOLOv4 with the XGBoost algorithm produces the most precise outcomes with a balance of accuracy and inference time. The proposed approach elegantly reduces an average of 32.3% of waiting time with usual traffic on the road.