Detection and classification of vehicles for traffic video analytics

Abstract

We present a traffic video analysis system based on computer vision techniques. The system is designed to automatically gather important statistics for policy makers and regulators in an automated fashion. These statistics include vehicle counting, vehicle type classification, estimation of vehicle speed from video and lane usage monitoring. The core of such system is the detection and classification of vehicles in traffic videos. We implement two models for this purpose, first is a MoG + SVM system and the second is based on Faster RCNN, a recently popular deep learning architecture for detection of objects in images. We show in our experiments that Faster RCNN outperforms MoG in detection of vehicles that are static, overlapping or in night time conditions. Faster RCNN also outperforms SVM for the task of classifying vehicle types based on appearances.