Measurement of traffic flow using real time processing of moving pictures

A system for measurement of traffic flow using real time processing of moving pictures has been developed. From pictures taken by an ITV camera, sixty-four picture elements in maximum are sampled, digitized in every TV frame and processed in the minicomputer. Brightness of the sampled points are compared with those of the ground and presence of vehicle is detected. Smoothing of the data effectively eliminates the noise. The number of passing vehicles is measured by using only one sampled point at the center of the lane, and the error of 2 to 3% was achieved in an experiment. Velocity and length of vehicles is measured from time difference by using a pair of sampled points set along the center of the lane. Also the number of vehicles in a road section is measured by using two sets of fifty sampled points along the center of the lane during successive two TV frames.