State-of-the-art review of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence (AI) for traffic and safety analyses: Recent progress, applications, challenges, and opportunities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This review comprehensively examines the intersection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in traffic and safety analyses, addressing their transformative impact on traffic monitoring, safety assessment, and environmental studies. By systematically analyzing over 315 scholarly works from 2009 to 2024, this review highlights the evolution from traditional data collection methods to UAV-enabled systems enhanced by advanced AI algorithms. The findings reveal UAVs’ significant contributions to traffic operations monitoring, safety evaluations, and special environmental applications, demonstrating enhanced efficiency in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting high-resolution traffic data. For instance, UAVs have improved traffic flow estimation accuracy by over 20%, enabled detailed safety conflict analysis through surrogate safety measures like Time-to-Collision (TTC), and facilitated data collection protocols optimized for diverse facility types, including intersections and roundabouts. Key challenges, such as data privacy, integration with existing systems, and weather-related limitations, are critically discussed. The review identifies future research directions, emphasizing the potential for autonomous UAV operations, ethical frameworks, and cost-effective scaling. Ultimately, this review underscores UAVs and AI as pivotal technologies reshaping traffic analysis, enabling smarter, safer, and more sustainable transportation systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".