Finetuning YOLOv9 for Vehicle Detection: Deep Learning for Intelligent Transportation Systems in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Rapid urbanization in megacities around the world, like Dhaka, has caused numerous transportation challenges that need to be addressed. Emerging technologies of deep learning and artificial intelligence can help us solve these problems to move towards Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in the city. The government of Bangladesh recognizes the integration of ITS to ensure smart mobility as a vital step towards the development plan "Smart Bangladesh Vision 2041", but faces challenges in understanding ITS, its effects, and directions to implement. A vehicle detection system can pave the way to understanding traffic congestion, finding mobility patterns, and ensuring traffic surveillance. So, this paper proposes a fine-tuned object detector, the YOLOv9 model to detect native vehicles trained on a Bangladesh-based dataset. Results show that the fine-tuned YOLOv9 model achieved a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.934 at the Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.5, achieving state-of-the-art performance over past studies on Bangladesh-based datasets, shown through a comparison. Later, by suggesting the model to be deployed on CCTVs (closed circuit television) on the roads, a conceptual technique is proposed to process the vehicle detection model output data in a graph structure creating a vehicle detection system in the city. Finally, applications of such vehicle detection system are discussed showing a framework on how it can solve further ITS research questions, to provide a rationale for policymakers to implement the proposed vehicle detection system in the city.