Smart Transparent Toll System with IOT,

Blockchain and AI
K Mohanarangan Dr. P Palaniswamy
Nokia Networks Private Ltd Department of ECE, NIT
Bangalore, India. Trichy, India
mohanarangan.kanniappan@nokia.com palan@nitt.edu

Abstract— The objective of this paper is to propose the
Smart Transparent Toll System (STTS), the approach
transforms the toll tariff collection system more transparent and
foolproof by validating the existing system of toll collection. Due
to urbanization, people's migration for employment and
livelihood scales up the transportation of goods and people. The
transportation needs good road infrastructure consequently,
The number of tolls and vehicles on roads growing many folds.
Most developing nations like India use manual toll collection
widely sofar, causing unacceptable delay at times. Also, now
automated toll lanes called Electronic Toll Collection (ETC)
system implemented with Radio Frequency Identification
(RFID) getting deployed at many places. Even though ETC can
make toll collection fast, it is not foolproof, as there are
possibilities of using RFID tags interchangeably among vehicles
of low to high chargeable or it can be stolen or any such
malfunction. Also, the existing toll collection system is lacking
with transparency and ease of auditing capabilities. Therefore it
is required to have a better fool-proof process which shall aid
in the auditing process as well validating the performance
of RFID based ETC toll system or manual system. The solution
discussed in this paper, makes toll system fool-proof and
transparent with mutually diversified technologies Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain (BC) bridged with the Internet
of Things (IoT) principles..
Keywords—AI, Blockchain, Deep Learning, Computer
Vision, Machine Vision, Image Classification, IOT, Hyper
Ledger Fabric, Toll Collection
or ETC toll system, therefore the ETC or the manual system
performance can be evaluated for validating.
There are two parts in the system, first to identify the
vehicle automatically to compute tariff estimate, second to
have a secure and transparent ledger of transactions. The
vehicle identification is done with computer vision principles
using deep learning framework. To keep the transaction safe,
transparent and fool-proof, blockchain technology proposed.
The blockchain technology has the potential to impact all
ledger-keeping processes, including the way transactions are
initiated, processed, authorized, stored and audited. The
blockchain was first introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in
2008[2] for digital currency trading named as Bitcoin, the
headline-grabbing decentralized digital currency. But,
nowadays, blockchain technology has applied far beyond
digital currency trading and is now being tested in a broad
range of business and financial applications. This paper
explains how to use the blockchain technology for toll
auditing and making it transparent by introducing trusted
third-party agencies and auditing nodes in the BC network.

I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, due to urbanization and industrialization,
transportation became backbone of any nation. The number
of vehicles fleeting over the roads is higher than in the past.
In most of the developing nations like India, national road
highway projects are developed and managed by private
sectors on Public-Private Partnership [1] (PPP) basis. The
manual system of toll tariff collection leads to wastage of
time, fuel and manpower. This does not meet the demands of
the current scenario of transportation. On the other hand, the
toll tariff collection and operation are completely in dark,
there are instances of scams and litigation on toll agencies for
unproportionate tariff charged over years. There are
complaints of poor maintenance of road infrastructure,
the higher tariff on vehicles consequently leading to inflation.
The toll operator employing toll tariff collection agents at
round the clock, this manual operation adds the overhead of
higher operating costs. The alternative that practiced is RFID
based toll collection [1], but this is not completely tamper-
proof, as the ETC based FasTags can be used
interchangeably, and no mechanisms to cross-check the same
unless manually watched by someone. This paper goal is to II. STTS SOLUTION OVERVIEW
propose a complete human free toll system, making a parallel
automated toll tariff estimate system with that of manual This section describes the overall high-level architecture
of the complete system with the significance of each layer,

1
the layers of the system are Vehicles layer, Image classifier,
Aggregator and finally BC network as shown in Fig. 1. The
vehicle images at toll lane are captured and classified for
tariff computation. The aggregator, which verifies the
manual or automated ETC tariff feed with the outcome of the
automated deep learning-based vehicle classifier. Also, the
aggregator forms the transaction block and proposes to the
BC network. The BC network nodes (nodes or peers mean
same in this paper) verifies the transactions and updates to the
immutable ledger of the blockchain. On high-level there are
two major blocks as discussed below.
A. CNN Based Vehicle Identification and Tariff Estimation
The computer vision based automated toll tariff estimate
requires vehicle class identification to determine the tariff, as
there are larger classes of vehicles and many customizations,
it requires the complex model to classify the vehicle. The
significant improvement in the capabilities of
the hardware fueled greater momentum on the computational
algorithm development and its applications. In the past the
complex algorithms which were practically unrealizable now
made through with the powerful hardware capabilities. There
is much more research going on AI and its algorithms which
shall be applied for real-life solutions. The machine learning
techniques works on the features chosen by humans. These
techniques require complex human-designed models to
translate raw input pixels into useful recognition responses.
Whereas deep learning techniques learns itself features of the
image given modifying its filter coefficients and bias values.
The deep learning techniques employed many fields within
computer vision, such as handwriting recognition and visual
object recognition [3] and classifications.
The TensorFlow is released by Google which is an open-
source software computational framework for building deep
learning and machine learning models. The TensorFlow in
deep learning arena supports CNN [3][4], recurrent neural
network (RNN) and other depth neural network models. The
2
TensorFlow based deep learning model used in robotics,
speech recognition, computer vision, information retrieval,
information extraction, natural language processing.
B. Transparency through Blockchain Technology
Secondly, it is proposed to use BC technology [5-8], which
shall make the toll collection system more transparent,
immutable and distributed. There are four pillars for BC
technology, which are decentralized, cryptographically
signed, ledger updated on consensus verifying business logic
(smart contract/chain code). Every node in the BC network
records transactions executed after verifying and validating on
consensus. The ledger recorded transaction cannot be changed
or erased and the history of each transaction can be re-created
at any time. Every node (In context to this paper node and peer
are same) has same ledger which is synch with all the other
nodes in the BC network. A BC network node ledger starts
with an initial or genesis block, which does not have
any preceding block. All the other blocks in the ledger, have
the hash value of preceding block. Once a block is added to
the chain, any altering in blocks in the later case by any of the
nodes or peers, immediately ledger desynch the chain with
other peers, by which it is tamper-proof property is
established. The transparency is achieved by introducing
trusted third-party agencies into the BC network. These
trusted agency nodes shall play a crucial role in ledger update
by a consensus process, also keeps tracks of the ledger. There
are many frameworks of the blockchain, based on this toll
transaction ledger use case requirements it is proposed to opt
for Hyper Ledger Fabric (HLF).

III. STTS TRANSACTION ARCHITECTUTE DESIGN
This section describes, how the complete the secured
transparent transaction can be processed with the
technologies discussed in session II. The overall system
architecture for proof of concept is shown in the Fig.2, which
is a more detailed architecture version of the Fig.1.
A. Vehicle layer
The Raspberry Pi 3 attached to the camera continuously
captures video. When there are any significant changes across
video frames, the motion is detected, frame extractor extracts
still images.
B. Vehicle Image Classification
The extracted vehicle image is classified using CNN
based deep learning model [3]. The toll tariff is charged based
on the vehicle class. This model is used to classify the
vehicles, as one of the class shown in Table 1.
C. Aggregation and Transaction preprocessing
The transaction cloud is created with transactions of all
the lanes. The transaction block is constructed as shown in
Fig.3. It is formed out of transactions obtained from each
lane’s vehicle image classifier, of the structure shown
in Table 2. The LAXTX mentioned in the Fig.3 is
lane transaction label identity, where the first “X” is for lane
number, and the second “X” for transaction no, also receives
license plate number (LP No) from the Automatic license
plate Reading module (ALPR) [9-12] module. Aggregator
computes tariff for each vehicle class of the transaction. It
accumulates “N” transactions of a block from the transaction
cloud, segregating block-wise before proposing
endorsement, it also sums the tariffs of “N” transactions and
adds to the block structure, hashes using SHA256, adds hash
value to block structure as shown in Fig.4. It also receives the
tariff data for each “N” transactions from respective Lane
Collection Agent (LCA) or RFID based reader, where “N” is
3
configurable. It proposes for endorsement through the client
SDK. The endorsement is triggered when the transaction
count per lane reaches “N”, and a block can be constructed.
In HLF [13-16] each transaction is independently endorsed,
but this paper proposes block-wise endorsement and
ordering. The block is formed and triggered when the ETC
feed and automatic reading matches with the toll tariff.
D. Blockchain enabled Transaction
The security and transparency are two extreme ends, the
blockchain technology bridges them. As shown in Fig. 2, the
blockchain network has five peers and a client. The peers are
Govt. agencies / auditors, toll operator, LCAs, and any trusted
third parties (TTP), and the leader or orderer node. The
number of the peer is not hard-fixed count, depending on the
need it can be up-sized. The leader node plays the role of
the orderer. There is an audit manager to make
a periodic audit of the transaction ledger. Every peer has
their own ledger which is in synch with other peers of the
network. This ensures complete transparency of the toll
system [14].
1) HLF
HLF Founded by Linux Foundation in 2015, which is
open-source software licensed under Apache License, the
Hyperledger project builds upon a collaborative approach to
develop blockchain technologies. HLF is one of the projects,
it is the main purpose is to have modular, extensive
architecture. This enables membership and consensus
services to be plug-and-play. HLF is an implementation
of permissions blockchain system for running the smart
contracts. The fabric is developed under the umbrella of
hyper ledger projects, an open-source collaborative effort to
create an enterprise, cross-industry blockchain system. HLF
provides the infrastructure for performing transactions
among mistrusting parties, which are logged in the immutable
distributed ledger. HLF uses a membership service provider
for issuing and validating certificates [15]. The common
entities of HLF or in the broader sense that of blockchain are
described as under.
 a) Shared ledger: Each peer of the BC network has a
ledger copy, the world state is the final updated state (hash
value) of the ledger of any node at a given point of time.
b) Client SDK: An application that proposes the
transaction for the BC network. In this proposed system,
Client SDK is the interface between the aggregator and the
BC network. The block structure is shown in Fig.4. The block
elements and their role illustrated in Table 3.
c) Peers: Maintain a state of the network, in this model
all the nodes act as endorsing and committing peers except
auditing node.Smart Contracts or Chaincode: Invoked by the
client application when required to interact with the ledger.
d) Smart Contracts or Chaincode: Invoked by the
client application when required to interact with the ledger.
e) Ordering: The ordering service proposes endorsed
transactions for consensus and commit to the BC network
peers. The ordering node can play the role of the leader during
the consensus process.
f) Consensus: The process of reaching agreement
among peers for transaction approval and ledger updating,
HLF shall use Practical Byzantine Fault
Tolerance(PBFT) which communicates with all the network
nodes to obtain the agreement on update of ledger [16]. The
consensus is obtained during endorsing and committing as
shown in Fig.5.
g) Validation: The transaction getting validated during
endorsement and commitment. In STTS transactions are
processed block-wise during endorsement and committing.
During the validation process, transaction gets mined by
computing world hash.
4
h) Verification: All the validated transaction
communicated to every other peer by which PBFT consensus
is obtained.
i) Security: It is public-private key infrastructure for
authentication and authorization of peers in the network. The
transactions can be encrypted to protect the integrity.
j) Certificates: There are two types of certificates, to
be obtained from Certificate Authority (CA). The enrollment
certificate for authorization. Then there is transaction
certificate for doing transaction.
2) HLF Based Transaction
The Fig.6 illustrates the toll transaction stages as per HLF V1
protocol. The following subsection describes in detail the
transaction flow.
a) Transaction Initiation: The client creates a
transaction proposal using SDK, it sends it to all peers that
need to sign it as per endorsement policy. Client packs
encrypt and signs before proposing to BC network.
b) Endorsement of Transaction: The client signature
validated. It checks block’s tariff sum equals to LCA’s tariff
data counterpart. It returns the following parameters by
signing to the client SDK.
 • world hash by simulating transaction without ledger
change,
• cumulative tariff sums,
• generated read/write(RW) sets,
• consensus obtained,
c) Invocation request : Would inspect the query
response, Check Endorsement Responses, Propose the
Transaction to Orderer
d) Order Transaction: The ordering service broadcast
the endorsed transactions and specifies the order in which
those transactions will be committed.
e) Commit Transaction: In the commit, transactions
validated against the chaincode or smart contract, to make
sure that the Read Write sets still match the current world
state. The consensus is checked and ledger of every peer or
node getting updated with the transaction block. Lastly, the
committing peers asynchronously notify the client
application of the success or failure of the transaction[16-18].
The Fig.5 shows the chain of blocks after commit.
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper has proposed for transparent smart toll system,
using BC technology to make the secure, distributed and
transparent transactions. The trusted third-party agencies
being member of the BC network, the complete transparency
operation can be realized. The smartness of the toll system is
realized by AI and deep learning for vehicle identification and
ALPR. This paper discusses comparing manual toll tariff
collection or ETC feed with the automated estimate.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research would not have been possible without the
support by Mr. T. Kabilan, Head of R&D, Nokia Networks,
Bangalore. His unconstrained freedom on my thoughts and
ideas were seeds for this work. I would thank Mr. Bharath
Morram, Manager, Nokia who was catalyst of this endeavor.
I would thank Nokia GIM team members, whose
encouragement helped to keep the spirit high. I would also
thank Mr. Mohan Kumara Vel, VP, Education, whose
feedback and suggestions directed me in right way.
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