National Ict Australia Limited

Kostia Robert

Yang Wang

Jun Yang

Jian Zhang

The invention concerns the detection of vehicles in images of a night time scene. In particular, but not limited to, the invention concerns a traffic surveillance system that is used to detect and track vehicles to determine information about the detected and tracked vehicles. Candidate pair of headlights are identifiedin an image based on luminance of points in the image. These candidates are then verifiedby identifyinga sub-image of the image sized to include a candidate vehicle having the pair of candidate headlights; and determining whether the candidate vehicle is a vehicle represented in the image by testingthe sub-image for the presence of predetermined features of a vehicle other than the headlights. Aspects of the invention include a method, software and computer hardware.

Detection of vehicles in images of a night time scene

The invention concerns a traffic surveillance system that is used to detect and track vehicles in video taken of a road from a low mounted camera. The inventors have discovered that even in heavily occluded scenes, due to traffic density or the angle of low mounted cameras capturing the images, at least one horizontal edge of the windshield is least likely to be occluded for each individual vehicle in the image. Thus, it is an advantage of the invention that the direct detection of a windshield on its own can be used to detect a vehicle in a single image. Multiple models are projected () onto an image with reference to different points in the image. The probability of each point forming part of a windshield is determined based on a correlation of the horizontal edges in the image with the horizontal edges of the windshield model referenced at that point (). This probability of neighboring points is used to possible detect a vehicle in the image (). Aspects of the invention include a method, software and traffic surveillance system.

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Kensington, Australia

Kostia Robert