Vehicle speed and dimensions estimation using on-road cameras by identifying popular vehicles

One of the major issues related to traffic monitoring systems is analyzing the behavior of vehicles and identifying their characteristics. In this paper, an automated algorithm is proposed for calibration of the road cameras. This calibration is used to estimate the speed and dimensions of the passing vehicles. In this method, a motion plane is obtained in the initial frames according to the direction of moving vehicles. After modeling the background, removing shadows, and identifying the exact boundaries of passing vehicles, a number of common vehicles are recognized by the Bag of Words method. Given the actual metric dimensions of these vehicles and the equivalent dimensions on the motion plane, the metric coefficients are calculated and the calibration process is completed. Each passing vehicle is projected on the motion plane, and speed and dimensions are calculated by tracking it along the road. To test the accuracy of the proposed method, we constructed a ground-truth video dataset, by simultaneous capturing the road vehicles using RGB and speed cameras. Furthermore, to identify common vehicles, a dataset of vehicle images was collected. The proposed method evaluated on our dataset and the mean error of 1.15 km/h is achieved. Accordingly, it outperforms previous methods.