Citation

Xu Y, Yu G, Wu X, Wang Y, Ma Y. IEEE Trans. Intel. Transp. Syst. 2017; 18(7): 1845-1856.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers))

DOI

10.1109/TITS.2016.2617202

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This research develops an advanced vehicle detection method, which improves the original Viola-Jones (V-J) object detection scheme for better vehicle detections from low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. The original V-J method is sensitive to objects' in-plane rotation, and therefore has difficulties in detecting vehicles with unknown orientations in UAV images. To address this issue, this research proposes a road orientation adjustment method, which rotates each UAV image once so that the roads and on-road vehicles on rotated images will be aligned with the horizontal direction and the V-J vehicle detector. Then, the original V-J can be directly applied to achieve better efficiency and accuracy. The enhanced V-J method is further applied for vehicle tracking. Testing results show that both vehicle detection and tracking methods are competitive compared with other existing methods. Future research will focus on expanding the current methods to detect other transport modes, such as buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians.

Language: en

Keywords

Automatic vehicle detection and identification systems; Data collection; Highways; Image analysis; Traffic surveillance; Video imaging detectors; Tracking systems; Drone aircraft; Control systems