Vehicle Detection Method Research Articles

YOLOv8-FDD: A Real-Time Vehicle Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv8

YOLOv8-FDD: A Real-Time Vehicle Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv8

Development of a High-Precision and Lightweight Detector and Dataset for Construction-Related Vehicles

Effective vehicle detection plays a crucial role in various applications in cities, including traffic management, urban planning, vehicle transport, and surveillance systems. However, existing vehicle detection methods suffer from low recognition accuracy, high computational costs, and excessive parameters. To address these challenges, this paper proposed a high-precision and lightweight detector along with a new dataset for construction-related vehicles. The dataset comprises 8425 images across 13 different categories of vehicles. The detector was based on a modified version of the You Only Look Once (YOLOv4) algorithm. DenseNet was utilized as the backbone to optimize feature transmission and reuse, thereby improving detection accuracy and reducing computational costs. Additionally, the detector employed depth-wise separable convolutions to optimize the model structure, specifically focusing on the lightweight neck and head components. Furthermore, H-swish was used to enhance non-linear feature extraction. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed detector achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 96.95% on the provided dataset, signifying a 4.03% improvement over the original YOLOv4. The computational cost and parameter count of the detector were 26.09GFLops and 16.08 MB, respectively. The proposed detector not only achieves lower computational costs but also provides higher detection when compared to YOLOv4 and other state-of-the-art detectors.

Detecting emergency vehicles With 1D-CNN using fourier processed audio signals

Emergency Vehicle Detection (EVD) is a critical task in transportation management. Vehicle audio analysis provides affordable and insightful data, compared to established yet expensive vehicle detection methods. This research presents two contributions. Firstly, to decrease the processing power and memory demands, it offers a method to detect the optimal maximum sampling frequencies through an analysis of correlation between spectral entropy (SE) and dataset variance, grounded in the principles of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and Nyquist–Shannon theorem. Secondly, to address the inconsistency between recorded data in different datasets, this paper proposes segmenting audio into small input time windows (ITW) and applying individualized normalization. Training the model on dataset-1 achieves 98.37% accuracy on the validation set, with 86.83% accuracy on dataset-2. Comparative analysis with the baseline Long-Short-Term Memory model shows 22.79% performance improvement in favor of the proposed 1D-CNN model. Overall, this model outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, achieving accuracy rate of 98.37%.

Vehicle and pedestrian detection method based on improved YOLOv4-tiny

Vehicle and pedestrian detection method based on improved YOLOv4-tiny

MC-YOLO-Based Lightweight Detection Method for Nighttime Vehicle Images in a Semantic Web-Based Video Surveillance System

Semantic web-based video surveillance systems can provide strong decision-making support for managers, and they have high requirements for real-time and precision of vehicle detection models in complex night scenes. To address this issue, a lightweight nighttime vehicle detection method (MC-YOLO) integrating MobileNetV2 and YOLOV3 is proposed. Firstly, in the preprocessing stage, image enhancement is performed on nighttime images to facilitate model feature extraction. Then, the lightweight network MobileNetV2 is used to extract feature by replacing the backbone network DarkNet53 in YOLOv3, thus accelerating the speed of target detection. Finally, after the convolution operation of the backbone network, a convolution block attention module is added to enhance the important feature information and suppress the secondary features, thereby improving the detection precision. The experimental results on the BDD100K dataset show that the proposed MC-YOLO model has a precision of up to 92.75%, which is superior to several other advanced comparative models.

Improved Vehicle Detection Using Weather Classification and Faster R-CNN with Dark Channel Prior

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have led to significant improvements in object detection. Researchers have focused on enhancing the performance of object detection in challenging environments, as this has the potential to enhance practical applications. Deep learning has been successful in image classification and target detection and has a wide range of applications, including vehicle detection. However, object detection models trained on high-quality images often struggle to perform well under adverse weather conditions, such as fog and rain. In this paper, we propose an improved vehicle detection method using weather classification and a Faster R-CNN with a dark channel prior (DCP). The proposed method first classifies the weather within the image, preprocesses the image using the dark channel prior (DCP) based on the classification result, and then performs vehicle detection on the preprocessed image using a Faster R-CNN. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown through experiments with images in various weather conditions.

Smart Road Stud-Empowered Vehicle Magnetic Field Distribution and Vehicle Detection

A self-designed AMR detector named Smart Road Stud (SRS) is proposed. SRS, installed along lane markings, is not only a detector but also a lane markings enhancement device. Because a single SRS needs to detect vehicles on two lanes, the vehicle detection method for SRS is different from the AMR detectors installed in the middle of the lane or at the roadside. Based on SRS, an innovative mathematical model based on the magnetic dipole is developed to simulate vehicle magnetic field. According to the model, lane information can be inferred to achieve traffic volume detection. Results show that a single SRS delivers traffic volume detection accuracy of 97%, providing a strong foundation for future research to achieve higher detection performance based on multi-SRS linkage. The significance of this paper is to meet the detection requirements of warning equipment installed on lane markings.

A Vehicle Detection Method Based on an Improved U-YOLO Network for High-Resolution Remote-Sensing Images

The lack of vehicle feature information and the limited number of pixels in high-definition remote-sensing images causes difficulties in vehicle detection. This paper proposes U-YOLO, a vehicle detection method that integrates multi-scale features, attention mechanisms, and sub-pixel convolution. The adaptive fusion module (AF) is added to the backbone of the YOLO detection model to increase the underlying structural information of the feature map. Cross-scale channel attention (CSCA) is introduced to the feature fusion part to obtain the vehicle’s explicit semantic information and further refine the feature map. The sub-pixel convolution module (SC) is used to replace the linear interpolation up-sampling of the original model, and the vehicle target feature map is enlarged to further improve the vehicle detection accuracy. The detection accuracies on the open-source datasets NWPU VHR-10 and DOTA were 91.35% and 71.38%. Compared with the original network model, the detection accuracy on these two datasets was increased by 6.89% and 4.94%, respectively. Compared with the classic target detection networks commonly used in RFBnet, M2det, and SSD300, the average accuracy rate values increased by 6.84%, 6.38%, and 12.41%, respectively. The proposed method effectively solves the problem of low vehicle detection accuracy. It provides an effective basis for promoting the application of high-definition remote-sensing images in traffic target detection and traffic flow parameter detection.

Vehicle Detection Based on Information Fusion of mmWave Radar and Monocular Vision

Single sensors often fail to meet the needs of practical applications due to their lack of robustness and poor detection accuracy in harsh weather and complex environments. A vehicle detection method based on the fusion of millimeter wave (mmWave) radar and monocular vision was proposed to solve this problem in this paper. The method successfully combines the benefits of mmWave radar for measuring distance and speed with the vision for classifying objects. Firstly, the raw point cloud data of mmWave radar can be processed by the proposed data pre-processing algorithm to obtain 3D detection points with higher confidence. Next, the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) clustering fusion algorithm and the nearest neighbor algorithm were also used to correlate the same frame data and adjacent frame data, respectively. Then, the effective targets from mmWave radar and vision were matched under temporal-spatio alignment. In addition, the successfully matched targets were output by using the Kalman weighted fusion algorithm. Targets that were not successfully matched were marked as new targets for tracking and handled in a valid cycle. Finally, experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can improve target localization and detection accuracy, reduce missed detection occurrences, and efficiently fuse the data from the two sensors.

Turning traffic surveillance cameras into intelligent sensors for traffic density estimation

AbstractAccurate traffic density plays a pivotal role in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The current practice to obtain the traffic density is through specialized sensors. However, those sensors are placed in limited locations due to the cost of installation and maintenance. In most metropolitan areas, traffic surveillance cameras are widespread in road networks, and they are the potential data sources for estimating traffic density in the whole city. Unfortunately, such an application is challenging since surveillance cameras are affected by the 4L characteristics: Low frame rate, Low resolution, Lack of annotated data, and Located in complex road environments. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of holistic frameworks for estimating traffic density from traffic surveillance camera data with 4 L characteristics. Therefore, we propose a framework for estimating traffic density using uncalibrated traffic surveillance cameras. The proposed framework consists of two major components: camera calibration and vehicle detection. The camera calibration method estimates the actual length between pixels in the images and videos, and the vehicle counts are extracted from the deep-learning-based vehicle detection method. Combining the two components, high-granular traffic density can be estimated. To validate the proposed framework, two case studies were conducted in Hong Kong and Sacramento. The results show that the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for the estimated traffic density is 9.04 veh/km/lane in Hong Kong and 7.03 veh/km/lane in Sacramento. The research outcomes can provide accurate traffic density without installing additional sensors.

Roadside LiDAR Sensor Configuration Assessment and Optimization Methods for Vehicle Detection and Tracking in Connected and Automated Vehicle Applications

This paper develops an assessment and optimization model for configuring roadside LiDAR (Line Detection and Ranging) installation. More specifically, an analytic and a simulation model have been developed to analyze the detection blind zones and their impact on vehicle detection and tracking capabilities in Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) applications. The proposed model can derive the area and height of the detection blind zones from a given roadside LiDAR location and road geometry. Evaluation metrics are also proposed to assess the severity of the blind zone including laser beam density, blind zone height and duration, vehicle trajectory missing rate and duration. The simulation model can be used to evaluate and identify optimal configurations for different installation scenarios. To validate the proposed model, the 15-min US101 NGSIM (Next Generation SIMulation) dataset was used for validating the proposed model. Different configuration settings were simulated and compared. The evaluation results demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed models in planning for optimal roadside LiDAR sensor installation for vehicle detection and tracking.

Robust LiDAR-Based Vehicle Detection for On-Road Autonomous Driving

The stable detection and tracking of high-speed vehicles on the road by using LiDAR can input accurate information for the decision-making module and improve the driving safety of smart cars. This paper proposed a novel LiDAR-based robust vehicle detection method including three parts: point cloud clustering, bounding box fitting and point cloud recognition. Firstly, aiming at the problem of clustering quality degradation caused by the uneven distribution of LiDAR point clouds and the difference in clustering radius between point cloud clusters in traditional DBSCAN (TDBSCAN) obstacle clustering algorithms, an improved DBSCAN algorithm based on distance-adaptive clustering radius (ADBSCAN) is designed, and a point cloud KD-Tree data structure is constructed to speed up the traversal of the algorithm; meanwhile, the OPTICS algorithm is introduced to enhance the performance of the proposed algorithm. Then, by adopting different fitting strategies for vehicle contour points in various states, the adaptability of the bounding box fitting algorithm is improved; Moreover, in view of the shortcomings of the poor robustness of the L-shape algorithm, the principal component analysis method (PCA) is introduced to obtain stable bounding box fitting results. Finally, considering the time-consuming and low-accuracy training of traditional machine learning algorithms, advanced PointNet in deep learning technique is built to send the point cloud within the bounding box of a high-confidence vehicle into PointNet to complete vehicle recognition. Experiments based on our autonomous driving perception platform and the KITTI dataset prove that the proposed method can stably complete vehicle target recognition and achieve a good balance between time-consuming and accuracy.

Anomaly Detection in Pedestrian Walkways for Intelligent Transportation System Using Federated Learning and Harris Hawks Optimizer on Remote Sensing Images

Anomaly detection in pedestrian walkways is a vital research area that uses remote sensing, which helps to optimize pedestrian traffic and enhance flow to improve pedestrian safety in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Engineers and researchers can formulate more potential techniques and tools with the power of computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) for mitigating potential safety hazards and identifying anomalies (i.e., vehicles) in pedestrian walkways. The real-world challenges of scenes and dynamics of environmental complexity cannot be handled by the conventional offline learning-based vehicle detection method and shallow approach. With recent advances in deep learning (DL) and ML areas, authors have found that the image detection issue ought to be devised as a two-class classification problem. Therefore, this study presents an Anomaly Detection in Pedestrian Walkways for Intelligent Transportation Systems using Federated Learning and Harris Hawks Optimizer (ADPW-FLHHO) algorithm on remote sensing images. The presented ADPW-FLHHO technique focuses on the identification and classification of anomalies, i.e., vehicles in the pedestrian walkways. To accomplish this, the ADPW-FLHHO technique uses the HybridNet model for feature vector generation. In addition, the HHO approach is implemented for the optimal hyperparameter tuning process. For anomaly detection, the ADPW-FLHHO technique uses a multi deep belief network (MDBN) model. The experimental results illustrated the promising performance of the ADPW-FLHHO technique over existing models with a maximum AUC score of 99.36%, 99.19%, and 98.90% on the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Ped1, UCSD Ped2, and avenue datasets, respectively. Therefore, the proposed model can be employed for accurate and automated anomaly detection in the ITS environment.

Vehicle detection and tracking using low-channel roadside LiDAR

Traffic object detection and tracking is one of the fundamental tasks in processing point cloud data to collect high-resolution vehicle trajectories using Roadside LiDAR sensors. Comprehensive, accurate, and complete traffic object tracking within the sensor’s scanning range still remains elusive, especially in complex traffic environments, mainly due to challenges like occlusion. To solve these issues, a novel vehicle detection and tracking method for low-channel roadside LiDAR in complex environments is proposed. Firstly, we use the L-shape fitting method to get a more accurate bounding box to extract the object features. Then, the decision tree with bagging algorithm is used to classify the traffic objects based on the selected features. Next, an improved Hungarian algorithm with the Kalman filter is used to predict the vehicle’s path considering the conditions of complete and partial occlusion. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated by comparing the roadside LiDAR data collected from four sites with the ground truth data obtained either from video-cameras or VeloView (software for point cloud data visualization). The result shows that the detection and tracking accuracy of the proposed method can reach up to 99.50% and 97%, respectively, which outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Fast vehicle detection based on colored point cloud with bird’s eye view representation

RGB cameras and LiDAR are crucial sensors for autonomous vehicles that provide complementary information for accurate detection. Recent early-level fusion-based approaches, flourishing LiDAR data with camera features, may not accomplish promising performance ascribable to the immense difference between two modalities. This paper presents a simple and effective vehicle detection method based on an early-fusion strategy, unified 2D BEV grids, and feature fusion. The proposed method first eliminates many null point clouds through cor-calibration. It augments point cloud data by color information to generate 7D colored point cloud, and unifies augmented data into 2D BEV grids. The colored BEV maps can then be fed to any 2D convolution network. A peculiar Feature Fusion (2F) detection module is utilized to extract multiple scale features from BEV images. Experiments on the KITTI public benchmark and Nuscenes dataset show that fusing RGB image with point cloud rather than raw point cloud can lead to better detection accuracy. Besides, the inference time of the proposed method reaches 0.05 s/frame thanks to its simple and compact architecture.

A Fast and Accurate Real-Time Vehicle Detection Method Using Deep Learning for Unconstrained Environments

Deep learning-based classification and detection algorithms have emerged as a powerful tool for vehicle detection in intelligent transportation systems. The limitations of the number of high-quality labeled training samples makes the single vehicle detection methods incapable of accomplishing acceptable accuracy in road vehicle detection. This paper presents detection and classification of vehicles on publicly available datasets by utilizing the YOLO-v5 architecture. This paper’s findings utilize the concept of transfer learning through fine tuning the weights of the pre-trained YOLO-v5 architecture. To employ the concept of transfer learning, extensive data sets of images and videos of the congested traffic patterns were collected by the authors. These datasets were made more comprehensive by pointing various attributes, for instance high- and low-density traffic patterns, occlusions, and different weather circumstances. All of these gathered datasets were manually annotated. Ultimately, the improved YOLO-v5 structure becomes accustomed to any difficult traffic patterns. By fine-tuning the pre-trained network through our datasets, our proposed YOLO-v5 has exceeded several other traditional vehicle detection methods in terms of detection accuracy and execution time. Detailed simulations performed on the PKU, COCO, and DAWN datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in various challenging situations.

A vehicle detection method based on disparity segmentation

A vehicle detection method based on disparity segmentation

A High-Precision Vehicle Detection and Tracking Method Based on the Attention Mechanism

Vehicle detection and tracking technology plays an important role in intelligent transportation management and control systems. This paper proposes a novel vehicle detection and tracking method for small target vehicles to achieve high detection and tracking accuracy based on the attention mechanism. We first develop a new vehicle detection model (YOLOv5-NAM) by adding the normalization-based attention module (NAM) to the classical YOLOv5s model. By exploiting the YOLOv5-NAM model as the vehicle detector, we then propose a real-time small target vehicle tracking method (JDE-YN), where the feature extraction process is embedded in the prediction head for joint training. Finally, we present extensive experimental results to verify our method on the UA-DETRAC dataset and to demonstrate that the method can effectively detect small target vehicles in real time. It is shown that compared with the original YOLOv5s model, the mAP value of the YOLOv5-NAM vehicle detection model is improved by 1.6%, while the MOTA value of the JDE-YN method improved by 0.9% compared with the original JDE method.

CenterLoc3D: monocular 3D vehicle localization network for roadside surveillance cameras

Monocular 3D vehicle localization is an important task for vehicle behaviour analysis, traffic flow parameter estimation and autonomous driving in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure System (CVIS), which is usually achieved by monocular 3D vehicle detection. However, monocular cameras cannot obtain depth information directly due to the inherent imaging mechanism, resulting in more challenging monocular 3D tasks. Currently, most of the monocular 3D vehicle detection methods still rely on 2D detectors and additional geometric constraint modules to recover 3D vehicle information, which reduces the efficiency. At the same time, most of the research is based on datasets of onboard scenes, instead of roadside perspective, which is limited in large-scale 3D perception. Therefore, we focus on 3D vehicle detection without 2D detectors in roadside scenes. We propose a 3D vehicle localization network CenterLoc3D for roadside monocular cameras, which directly predicts centroid and eight vertexes in image space, and the dimension of 3D bounding boxes without 2D detectors. To improve the precision of 3D vehicle localization, we propose a multi-scale weighted-fusion module and a loss with spatial constraints embedded in CenterLoc3D. Firstly, the transformation matrix between 2D image space and 3D world space is solved by camera calibration. Secondly, vehicle type, centroid, eight vertexes, and the dimension of 3D vehicle bounding boxes are obtained by CenterLoc3D. Finally, centroid in 3D world space can be obtained by camera calibration and CenterLoc3D for 3D vehicle localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of 3D vehicle localization for roadside monocular cameras. Hence, we also propose a benchmark for this application including a dataset (SVLD-3D), an annotation tool (LabelImg-3D), and evaluation metrics. Through experimental validation, the proposed method achieves high accuracy with A{P_{3D}} of 51.30%, average 3D localization precision of 98%, average 3D dimension precision of 85% and real-time performance with FPS of 41.18.

Robust Vehicle Detection Based on Improved You Look Only Once

Vehicle detection is still challenging for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to achieve satisfactory performance. The existing methods based on one stage and two-stage have intrinsic weakness in obtaining high vehicle detection performance. Due to advancements in detection technology, deep learning-based methods for vehicle detection have become more popular because of their higher detection accuracy and speed than the existing algorithms. This paper presents a robust vehicle detection technique based on Improved You Look Only Once (RVD-YOLOv5) to enhance vehicle detection accuracy. The proposed method works in three phases; in the first phase, the K-means algorithm performs data clustering on datasets to generate the classes of the objects. Subsequently, in the second phase, the YOLOv5 is applied to create the bounding box, and the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) technique is used to eliminate the overlapping of the bounding boxes of the vehicle. Then, the loss function CIoU is employed to obtain the accurate regression bounding box of the vehicle in the third phase. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves better results when compared with other state-of-art techniques, namely Lightweight Dilated Convolutional Neural Network (LD-CNN), Single Shot Detector (SSD), YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 on the performance metric like precision, recall, mAP and F1-Score. The simulation and analysis are carried out on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012 and MS COCO 2017 datasets to obtain better performance for vehicle detection. Finally, the RVD-YOLOv5 obtains the results with an mAP of 98.6% and Precision, Recall, and F1-Score are 98%, 96.2% and 97.09%, respectively.