Fine-grained vehicle recognition in traffic surveillance

Abstract

Fine-grained vehicle recognition in traffic surveillance plays a crucial part in establishing intelligent transportation system. The major challenge lies in that differences among vehicle models are always subtle. In this paper, we propose a part-based method combining global and local feature for fine-grained vehicle recognition in traffic surveillance. We develop a novel voting mechanism to unify the preliminary recognition results, which are obtained by using Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNN), leading to fully exploiting the discriminative ability of different parts. Besides, we collect a comprehensive public database for 50 common vehicle models with manual annotation of parts, which is used to evaluate the proposed method and serves as supportive dataset for related work. The experiments show that the average recognition accuracy of our method can approach 92.3%, which is 3.4%–7.1% higher than the state-of-art approaches.