Anitya Anand,
- Student, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Greater Noida Institute of Technology, Uttar Pradesh, India
Abstract
Urban traffic congestion imposes staggering economic and environmental costs on modern cities, with the INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard estimating annual per-driver productivity losses exceeding $1,348 in major metropolitan areas. Conventional traffic management infrastructure—fixed-cycle signal controllers, manual surveillance, and threshold-based incident detection—is fundamentally ill-equipped to address the dynamic, non-linear complexity of contemporary urban vehicular flows. This paper introduces TrafficNet-DRL, a unified deep learning and deep reinforcement learning framework for real-time traffic monitoring, flow prediction, anomaly detection, and adaptive signal control. The proposed architecture integrates three tightly coupled subsystems: (i) a spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) for multi-intersection traffic flow prediction; (ii) a YOLOv8-based multi-class vehicle detection and tracking pipeline with ReID capabilities for density estimation and incident identification; and (iii) a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) controller that dynamically optimizes phase durations across interconnected signalized intersections. TrafficNet-DRL is evaluated on three heterogeneous urban datasets—METR-LA, PEMS-BAY, and a newly constructed IntersectionNet-8K benchmark comprising 8,200 hours of annotated intersection footage from 24 instrumented junctions. Experimental results demonstrate a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.14 km/h in 30-minute flow prediction, a vehicle detection [email protected] of 96.3%, and a 34.7% reduction in average intersection delay relative to Webster’s fixed-cycle baselines. The framework additionally reduces vehicular carbon emission proxies by an estimated 18.4% through idle time minimization. Collectively, these outcomes establish TrafficNet-DRL as a state-of-the-art, deployable solution for intelligent urban traffic management.
Keywords: Intelligent traffic management, deep reinforcement learning, spatiotemporal graph networks, YOLOv8 vehicle detection, adaptive signal control, urban mobility, smart city, multi-agent systems, real-time traffic monitoring, incident detection
[This article belongs to Journal of Multimedia Technology & Recent Advancements ]
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Journal of Multimedia Technology & Recent Advancements
| Volume | 13 | |
| Issue | 02 | |
| Received | 29/06/2026 | |
| Accepted | 30/07/2026 | |
| Published | 15/08/2026 | |
| Publication Time | 47 Days |
