Real-time Road-Visibility Measurement Using CCTV Camera
Bong-keun Kim, In-Soo Chang, Lee Gwang · Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for transportation studies/Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies · 2011
The highway visibility reduction caused by fog is one of the major elements of traffic accidents. Though the fog warning systems can lead drivers into safe driving by letting them aware dangerous situations in advance, the optical sensors, such as fog sensor, has been extremely costly. Through recent studies, it is delivered that visibility measurements have become obtainable with relatively cheap cameras and their functionality is as similar as a driver' visual sense. Those measurements however require additional signs or ROI, so it is still costly and unable to utilize the conventional images from the existing systems. This study proposes a new method to detect the visibility in real time based on the conventional images from the existing CCTV cameras. The proposed method builds a road model and extracts and applies vehicle movements and visible lines - those highlight easy and quick visibility measurements. The proposed method has advantages of both (1) having possible day and night visibility measurements similar to drivers' visual sense and (2) being easily applied to the existing CCTV system without additional devices. This paper presents field experiments using images acquired from the Central Inland Expressway and discusses future research directions.