Real-time car tracking system based on surveillance videos

Abstract

As a variety of video surveillance devices such as CCTV, drones, and car dashboard cameras have become popular, numerous studies have been conducted regarding the effective enforcement of security and surveillance based on video analysis. In particular, in car-related surveillance, car tracking is the most challenging task. One early approach to accomplish such a task was to analyze frames from different video sources separately. Considering the shooting range of the bulk of video devices, the outcome from the analysis of single video source is highly limited. To obtain more comprehensive information for car tacking, a set of video sources should be considered together and the relevant information should be integrated according to spatial and temporal constraints. Therefore, in this study, we propose a real-time car tracking system based on surveillance videos from diverse devices including CCTV, dashboard cameras, and drones. For scalability and fault tolerance, our system is built on a distributed processing framework and comprises a Frame Distributor, a Feature Extractor, and an Information Manager. The Frame Distributor is responsible for distributing the video frames from various devices to the processing nodes. The Feature Extractor extracts principal vehicle features such as plate number, location, and time from each frame. The Information Manager stores all the features into a database and handles user requests by collecting relevant information from the feature database. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed system, we implemented a prototype system and performed a number of experiments. We report some of the results.