Vehicle detection from an image sequence collected by a hovering helicopter

Vehicle detection from an image sequence collected by a hovering helicopter

Karimi Nejadasl, F.
Lindenbergh, R.C.

Aerospace Engineering

Remote Sensing

2011-10-05

This paper addresses the problem of vehicle detection from an image sequence in difficult cases. Difficulties are notably caused by relatively small vehicles, vehicles that appear with low contrast or vehicles that drive at low speed. The image sequence considered here is recorded by a hovering helicopter and was stabilized prior to the vehicle detection step considered here. A practical algorithm is designed and implemented for this purpose of vehicle detection. Each pixel is identified firstly as either a background (road) or a foreground (vehicle) pixel by analyzing its gray-level temporal profile in a sequential way. Secondly, a vehicle is identified as a cluster of foreground pixels. The results of this new method are demonstrated on a test image-sequence featuring very congested traffic but also smoothly flowing traffic. It is shown that for both traffic situations the method is able to successfully detect low contrast, small size and low speed vehicles.

foreground and background identification
vehicle detection
temporal profile
sequential method
maximum frequency

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bbd2f0e4-f073-4286-89c7-b50774d3a810

International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS)

978-3-642-24392-9

PIA11: Photogrammetric Image Analysis, Munich, Germany, 5-7 October 2011; IAPRS, XXXVIII (3/W22), 2011

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2011 The Author(s)
Delft University of Technology