Robust image-based detection of activity for traffic control
Yanfang Liu, Pierre Payeur · Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering · 2003
An important application of image processing and computer vision is the development of intelligent systems for traffic monitoring, management and optimization. This paper presents a system for real-time detection of moving vehicles approaching an intersection from sequences of colour images acquired by a stationary camera. The proposed approach is developed in the context of traffic-light control systems. As the system is dedicated to outdoor applications, efficient and robust vehicle detection under various weather and illumination conditions must be achieved. To deal with these ever-changing conditions, the vehicle detection relies on motion segmentation with dynamic background representation and on an original switching algorithm using hue-saturation-value (HSV) colour mapping to achieve feature space segmentation. Experimental results using real outdoor image sequences demonstrate the systems robustness under various and difficult environmental conditions.