HVD-Net: A Hybrid Vehicle Detection Network for Vision-Based Vehicle Tracking and Speed Estimation

Abstract

Visual surveillance of on-road vehicles has emerged as a vibrant research topic within the fields of computer vision and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) to mitigate traffic problems. Road accidents result in traffic congestion, vehicle damage, injuries, and fatalities. The likelihood, severity, and fatality of automobile collisions are all increased by speeding. Autonomous Speed Limit Violation Detection (SLVD) mechanism offers the best way to estimate speed with high precision using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) technology. Vision-based Vehicle Speed Monitoring (VSM) pipeline is proposed in this work, which includes mechanisms for vehicle detection, tracking, and speed measurement. VSM pipeline is based on a three-tier architecture, exploiting a single RSU-camera. In the first tier, a real-time CNN-based Hybrid Vehicle Detection Network (HVD-Net) is designed for vehicle detection. The HVD-Net utilizes multi-level and multi-scale features to minimize the impact of vehicle scale variation and maximize detection accuracy. Secondly, a Simple Online Real-time Tracker (SORT) along with HVD-Net is adopted to track vehicles' trajectories. The tracker utilizes a Kalman filter for vehicle state estimation and a Hungarian algorithm to solve the multi-vehicle association problem. Finally, a mechanism is presented to estimate the vehicle speed in the motion plane to mitigate speed overestimation. Empirical evaluations on three datasets demonstrate that the proposed vehicle detection, tracking, and speed estimation schemes perform better when compared with the relevant and state-of-the-art schemes. The estimated pipeline vehicle speed is achieved with accuracy of 87.242%.