Robust automated ground plane rectification based on moving vehicles for traffic scene surveillance

Most outdoor visual surveillance scenes involve objects of interest moving on the ground plane. However, perspective distortion introduces many difficulties to various applications like object classification and activity recognition. In this paper, we propose a robust automated method for both affine and metric rectification of the ground plane based on appearance and motion of vehicles in traffic scene surveillance videos. This rectification enables normalization of object properties like size, length and velocity. Various useful applications are presented and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.