A Distributed Magnetic Sensor Network: Vehicle Trajectory Tracking Based on Cellular Automaton

Magnetic sensor-based vehicle detection is a crucial approach for traffic information collection. However, existing methods that rely on individual magnetic sensors—typically installed at the lane center or roadside—struggle in multilane scenarios due to weak data correlation across sensors and limited accuracy from the isolated sensor. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel method that integrates a distributed wireless magnetic sensor network with a temporal-spatial correlation algorithm to associate vehicle signals from multiple sensors. Compared with traditional single-sensor methods, the proposed approach significantly enhances detection reliability by enabling cross-lane vehicle signal fusion. A vehicle position localization technique is introduced to identify detection events, achieving a detection rate of approximately 90%. Experimental results show that while common errors include lane positioning, duplication, omission, and interference, these tend to counteract each other, resulting in a traffic volume detection accuracy of 99.6%. Furthermore, a cellular automaton-based trajectory tracking model is proposed to connect vehicle positions into continuous trajectories, yielding an 89.0% trajectory accuracy and further reducing detection errors. The construction of vehicle trajectories also lays a foundation for future applications such as vehicle speed estimation and vehicle type classification.