A computer vision assisted geoinformation inventory for traffic infrastructure

Geoinformation inventories are often employed as a tool for providing a comprehensive view onto the required state of traffic control infrastructure. They are especially important in road safety inspection where, in combination with georeferenced video, they enable repeatable off-line and off-site assessments as an attractive aternative to classic onsite inspection. Nevertheless, manual assessments are tedious and time-consuming even when performed off-line, and this seriously impairs the potential of the geoinformation inventory concept. This paper therefore researches a hypothesis that suitable georeferenced video processing techniques would allow reliable automation of the following operations: i) creation of the traffic inventory from the given video, and ii) assessing the video against the state in the inventory. Prominent computer vision approaches have been rigorously and systematically evaluated and the obtained results are presented. The results seem to support the hypothesis, although further work is required for a more definite answer.