iTRAC : intelligent video compression for automated traffic surveillance systems.
Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Aggelos K Katsaggelo, Eren Soyak · 2010
Non-intrusive video imaging sensors are commonly used in traffic monitoring and surveillance. For some applications it is necessary to transmit the video data over communication links. However, due to increased requirements of bitrate this means either expensive wired communication links or the video data being heavily compressed to not exceed the allowed communications bandwidth. Current video imaging solutions utilize aging video compression standards and require dedicated wired communication lines. Recently H.264 (a newer standard) has been proposed to be used in transportation applications. However, most video compression algorithms are not optimized for traffic video data and do not take into account the possible data analysis that will follow either in real time at the control center or offline. As a result of compression, the visual quality of the data may be low, but more importantly, as the authors' research efforts in vehicle tracking has shown, the tracking accuracy and efficiency is severely affected. iTRAC aims to inject highway content- awareness in the H.264 encoding standard. The authors' technology operates within the computational limits of consumer grade hardware equipment. With the possible reduction in bitrate they envision that they can provide a portable, easy to deploy, low cost, low power, wireless video imaging sensor.