Publication
This paper presents a comprehensive framework for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from high-altitude drone imagery, addressing key challenges in urban traffic monitoring and the limitations of traditional ground-based systems. Our approach integrates several novel contributions, including a tailored object detector optimized for high-altitude bird’s-eye view perspectives, a unique track stabilization method that uses detected vehicle bounding boxes as exclusion masks during image registration, and an orthophoto and master frame-based georeferencing strategy that enhances consistent alignment across multiple drone viewpoints. Additionally, our framework features robust vehicle dimension estimation and detailed road segmentation, enabling comprehensive traffic dynamics analysis. Conducted in the Songdo International Business District, South Korea, the study utilized a multi-drone experiment covering 20 intersections, capturing approximately 12TB of ultra-high-definition video data over four days. The framework produced two high-quality datasets: the Songdo Traffic dataset, comprising approximately 700,000 unique vehicle trajectories, and the Songdo Vision dataset, containing over 5000 human-annotated images with about 300,000 vehicle instances categorized into four classes. Comparisons with high-precision sensor data from an instrumented probe vehicle highlight the accuracy and consistency of our extraction pipeline in dense urban environments. The public release of the Songdo Traffic and Songdo Vision datasets, along with the complete source code for the extraction pipeline, establishes new benchmarks in data quality, reproducibility, and scalability in traffic research. The results demonstrate the potential of integrating drone technology with advanced computer vision methods for precise and cost-effective urban traffic monitoring, providing valuable resources for developing intelligent transportation systems and enhancing traffic management strategies.