California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Over the years, many TMCs have accumulated large loop detector datasets due to the loops' extensive presence in existing infrastructure. However, the information in these data sets often lies dormant partly because of the lack of effective means to summarize and display it. We present a simple visualization technique developed for loop detector data which addresses this issue. The method uses color-encoded images to visualize loop detector measurements as a function of space and time. We use examples based on a field dataset to illustrate some of its possible applications.