3D-connected components analysis for traffic monitoring in image sequences acquired from a helicopter

Abstract

The aim of the study was to develop methods for moving vehicle tracking in aerial image sequences taken over urban areas. The first image of the sequence was manually registered to a map. Corner points were extracted semi-automatically, then tracked along the sequence, to enable video stabilisation by homography estimation. Moving objects were detected by means of adaptive background subtraction. The vehicles were identified among many stabilisation artifacts and tracked, with a simple tracker based on spatiotemporal connected components analysis. While the techniques used were basic, the results turned out to be encouraging, and several improvements are under scrutiny. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.