Motion-based Vehicle Speed Measurement for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract

Video-based vehicle speed measurement systems are known as effective applications for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) due to their great development capabilities and low costs. These systems utilize camera outputs to apply video processing techniques and extract the desired information. This paper presents a new vehicle speed measurement approach based on motion detection. Contrary to feature-based methods that need visual features of the vehicles like license-plate or windshield, the proposed method is able to estimate vehicle’s speed by analyzing its motion parameters inside a pre-defined Region of Interest (ROI) with specified dimensions. This capability provides real-time computing and performs better than feature-based approaches. The proposed method consists of three primary modules including vehicle detection, tracking, and speed measurement. Each moving object is detected as it enters the ROI by the means of Mixture-of-Gaussian background subtraction method. Then by applying morphology transforms, the distinct parts of these objects turn into unified filled shapes and some defined filtration functions leave behind only the objects with the highest possibility of being a vehicle. Detected vehicles are then tracked using blob tracking algorithm and their displacement among sequential frames are calculated for final speed measurement module. The outputs of the system include the vehicle’s image, its corresponding speed, and detection time. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has an acceptable accuracy in comparison with current speed measurement systems.