A Fast Vehicular Traffic Flow Prediction Scheme Based on Fourier and Wavelet Analysis

Currently, traffic congestion has become a part of daily life of people in the cities around the world, and impacts people's lives adversely, e.g., the extra time spent on commuting, the extra exhaust emissions, etc. In order to reduce the effects of congestion on our lives, intensive research efforts have been proposed on this issue. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is one of potential solutions to enable various applications to improve road safety and travel comfort, and has gained a lot of attention from researchers around the world. In order to efficiently manage the transportation system and reduce traffic congestion, one of the paramount problems needed to be solved in ITS is the accurate traffic prediction. In this article, we firstly combine Fourier analysis with wavelet denoising technique to cope with the traffic flow forecasting problem. A two-layer fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based traffic prediction scenario is proposed, in which the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with two different threshold values are adopted to decompose the high-frequent-noise and identify low-frequent traffic flow changing trend from the original data. Three different data sets with different traffic flow patterns are chosen from the England Highways data set to test our proposed work. Intensive simulations are implemented to verify the proposed work.