Design and Evaluation of an Edge AI-Enabled Low-Power Magnetic Sensor for Real-Time Road Traffic Monitoring

Road traffic surveys require sensing systems that can be deployed rapidly without modifying the road surface or requiring a permanent power connection. This paper presents the design, embedded implementation, and evaluation of a low-power roadside magnetic sensor that performs vehicle-event detection and classification directly at the edge. The sensing node integrates two RM3100 three-axis magnetometers (PNI Sensor, Santa Rosa, CA, USA) with an NXP MK22FN512VLH12 microcontroller (NXP Semiconductors N.V., Eindhoven, The Netherlands) based on a 120 MHz Arm Cortex-M4F core with 512 kB Flash and 128 kB SRAM. Magnetic-field data are acquired at 250 Hz and processed locally using baseline removal, low-pass filtering, signal-energy calculation, and peak-based event detection. Detected magnetic signatures are classified using an integer-quantised one-dimensional convolutional neural network implemented directly on the microcontroller. The model processes four synchronised 512-sample channels representing the three magnetic-field axes and their combined signal energy. Model development was supported by approximately 50,000 annotated events obtained from 36 h of real-world traffic measurements at eight locations. The selected model achieved an overall classification accuracy of 91.1% for the considered operational categories. The implemented network requires 288,128 multiply–accumulate operations per inference, while its quantised weights and biases occupy approximately 23 kB of Flash memory. Complete three-axis event signatures are stored locally for subsequent verification, whereas only the timestamp and predicted vehicle category are transmitted through the wireless interface. Based on the capacity of the applied LiFePO₄ battery and the estimated consumption of the implemented hardware, the expected autonomous operating period is approximately 41 days. The results demonstrate the feasibility of integrating magnetic sensing, embedded signal processing, and Edge AI on a conventional resource-constrained Cortex-M4 platform for non-invasive road traffic monitoring.