Vehicle detection and tracking for traffic monitoring

Abstract

This paper addresses some of the indications of the European Union for road safety by proposing a real-time traffic monitoring system for vehicle detection and tracking in bad illuminated scenarios. Several urban and extraurban roads during the night or tunnels are characterized by low illumination, light spots, shadows, light reflections, etc. The main objectives of the proposed system are: (a) to monitor the traffic flow, (b) to estimate the vehicle's speed or determine the state of the traffic, (c) to detect anomalous situations, e.g. rising alarms in case of road accidents or stopped cars. Experimental results on real image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.