Vision-based detection of activity for traffic control

One important application of image processing and computer vision is traffic monitoring and control. This paper presents a system for detection of moving vehicles approaching an intersection from color images acquired by a stationary camera in the context of traffic light control systems. As the system is dedicated to outdoor applications, efficient and robust vehicle detection under various weather and illumination conditions is examined. To deal with these ever changing conditions, vehicle detection relies on motion segmentation and color mapping to achieve feature space segmentation. Experimental results using real outdoor sequences of images demonstrate the system´s robustness under various environmental conditions.