  A computational method, based on $\ell_1$-minimization, is proposed for the
problem of link flow correction, when the available traffic flow data on many
links in a road network are inconsistent with respect to the flow conservation
law. Without extra information, the problem is generally ill-posed when a large
portion of the link sensors are unhealthy. It is possible, however, to correct
the corrupted link flows \textit{accurately} with the proposed method under a
recoverability condition if there are only a few bad sensors which are located
at certain links. We analytically identify the links that are robust to
miscounts and relate them to the geometric structure of the traffic network by
introducing the recoverability concept and an algorithm for computing it. The
recoverability condition for corrupted links is simply the associated
recoverability being greater than 1. In a more realistic setting, besides the
unhealthy link sensors, small measurement noises may be present at the other
sensors. Under the same recoverability condition, our method guarantees to give
an estimated traffic flow fairly close to the ground-truth data and leads to a
bound for the correction error. Both synthetic and real-world examples are
provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
