Vehicle detection and speed estimation for automated traffic surveillance systems at nighttime

Abstract

This article proposes a vehicle detection and speed measurement system to estimate a vehicle’s velocity by identifying its headlight properties in a nighttime environment. We present a traffic surveillance system for vehicle detection and tracking in the nighttime along with a background extraction and automatic vanishing point detection process. We show that a single video camera can sufficiently and effectively operate to concurrently calculate and detect a vanishing point during the daytime. We have applied this to preprocessing in an automated traffic surveillance system in the nighttime. The experimental results show that vehicle tracking is possible, even in the nighttime. Preliminary experimental results confirm the possibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for this nighttime vehicle surveillance system. They demonstrate that a single camera with an embedded image processing system can concurrently monitor, detect and track multiple vehicles in multiple lanes during the nighttime as successfully as the daytime.