Automated Approach for Computer Vision-Based Vehicle Movement Classification at Traffic Intersections

Abstract

Movement-specific vehicle classification and counting at traffic intersections is a crucial component of various traffic management activities. In this context, with recent advancements in computer-vision-based techniques, cameras have emerged as a reliable data source for extracting vehicular trajectories from traffic scenes. However, classifying these trajectories by movement type is quite challenging, as characteristics of motion trajectories obtained this way vary depending on camera calibrations. Although some existing methods have addressed such classification tasks with decent accuracies, the performance of these methods significantly relied on the manual specification of several regions of interest. In this study, we proposed an automated classification method for movement-specific classification (such as right-turn, left-turn and through movements) of vision-based vehicle trajectories. Our classification framework identifies different movement patterns observed in a traffic scene using an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique. Thereafter, a similarity-based assignment strategy is adopted to assign incoming vehicle trajectories to identified movement groups. A new similarity measure was designed to overcome the inherent shortcomings of vision-based trajectories. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed classification approach and its ability to adapt to different traffic scenarios without any manual intervention.