Stereo Visual Tracking Within Structured Environments for Measuring Vehicle Speed

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 22; no. 10; pp. 1471 - 1484
• Main Authors: Junda Zhu, Liang Yuan, Zheng, Y. F., Ewing, R. L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.10.2012; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Accuracy; Applied sciences; Cameras; Detection, estimation, filtering, equalization, prediction; Exact sciences and technology; Feature extraction; Image processing; Information, signal and communications theory; Object tracking; particle filtering; Pattern recognition; Radar tracking; Signal and communications theory; Signal processing; Signal, noise; stereo vision; structured environments; Telecommunications and information theory; Three dimensional displays; Tracking; Vehicles; Performance evaluation; Target tracking; Motion estimation; Stereo image processing; Image processing; Stereoscopy; Speed measurement; Object tracking; structured environments; Accuracy; particle filtering; Object detection; Signal processing; stereo vision; Target detection; Particle filter
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2012.2202074

We present a novel visual tracking method for measuring the speed of a moving vehicle within a structured environment using stationary stereo cameras. In the proposed method, visual stereo tracking and motion estimation in 3-D are integrated within the framework of particle filtering. The visual tracking processes in the two views are coupled with each other since they are dependent upon the same 3-D motion and correlated in the observations. Considering that the vehicle's motion is physically constrained by the environment, we further utilize the path constraint reconstructed from stereo views to reduce the uncertainty about the vehicle's motion and improve the accuracy for both tracking and speed measuring. The proposed method overcomes the challenges arising from the limitation of depth accuracy in a long-range stereo, and the experiments on the synthetic and real-world sequences have demonstrated its effectiveness and accuracy in both the tracking performance and the speed measurement.