Pixel matching search algorithm for counting moving vehicle in highway traffic videos

Abstract

Traffic monitoring through video processing is one of the hot research areas in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Vehicle counting systems should be simple enough to be applied in real-time circumstances. A novel and fast algorithm for vehicle counting from a traffic video sequence is proposed in this paper where the vehicle tracking step is not necessary. A reference model is only created in the video frames for a narrow area. When going through this narrow area, the moving vehicles are identified as foreground objects. Detection of moving vehicles is achieved by integrating approximated median filter based background subtraction with binary integral projection. The detected candidates are counted as a vehicle using a novel pixel matching search algorithm. The proposed algorithm does not rely on every video frame. It only requires every third frame for processing and thus increases the computation speed by three times compared to existing techniques. The proposed algorithm is tested and validated on a standard data set as well as a custom data set. Two parameters such as accuracy and processing time are used for the system evaluation where an overall accuracy of 96.84% is achieved. The processing time results show that the proposed system can perform in real-time with an average real-time processing speed of 93.92%.