Patent ID: 8825586

Claim:
A method for determining and recognizing types of vehicles passing a check point, which comprises: up-loading an EM algorithm into a CPU; collecting vehicle data as vehicles drive past a check point; entering said data into said CPU said data being representative of essential characteristics of vehicles; processing said data by said EM algorithm to produce an output model of the traffic volumes of the various types of vehicles; and utilizing said output model to forecast future road maintenance costs and/or to plan and design future road networks, wherein said EM algorithm is specially adapted to carry out the following steps: 1) standardize said data in sets; 2) when said data is standardized in sets, start with k 1; 3) set the initial value of μk to be the mean of the data set; 4) set the initial diagonal entries of Σk to be the variances of each variable; 5) set P(K)=1; 6) run clustering with the EM algorithm in this cluster; 7) obtain the new values for μk, Σk, (Pk) and the probability matrix P (k 1 xn); 8) define the BIC for this model as BICold=−(½)·Vold·log(N); 9) set k_prev= · k; and 10) repeat the following steps until k_prev=k; a) set k_prev=k and a new variable called trace=1; b) repeat the following steps until trace=k_prev; (i) split the cluster at position trace into two clusters using PCA; (ii) select data points to perform PCA from the data points that are most likely to come from cluster trace by checking the values in the probability marix P (k 1 xn); (iii) run clustering with the EM algorithm for this new model; (iv) obtain μk's, Σk's and (Pk)'s and the probability matrix P (k 1 xn)'s, and for the new model; (v) define the BIC for this new model as BICnew=−λnew−(½)*Vnew*log(N); (vi) if λnew−λold>a·(½)·(N)·(vnew−Vold), then replace the old model with the new model obtained in step (iii); (vii) set K=+1; (viii) if λnew−λold is not >a·(½)·(N)·(vnew−Vold), then keep the original model; (ix) trace=trace+1; and 11) finally report the final model; thereby determining and recognizing the types of vehicles passing the checkpoint to determine and recognize vehicle types in high volume traffic for monitoring traffic volumes of various types of vehicles, forecasting future road maintenance costs and planning and design of future road networks; wherein in said steps: N=number of data points; V=number of variables; K=number of clusters; μk=the mean for kill cluster, each a vector of length V; f° k:=the covariance matrices for kth cluster, each of size V*V; xn · =the nth data point, which is a vector with length V; P(k ! xn:)=the probability that xn comes from cluster k; p(k)=: the probability that a data point chosen randomly comes from cluster k; P(xn)=the probability of finding a data point at position xn; λ=the value of log likelihood of the estimated parameter set; PCA=Principal Component Analysis; and BIC=Bayesian Information Criterion.