Design of a heterogeneous, energy-aware, stereo-vision based sensing platform for traffic surveillance

The biggest challenges faced by intelligent traffic monitoring systems are mobility, compactness and energy-efficiency. Current traffic monitoring systems are based on fixed installations and thus have no or least portability. Also, they use many sensors (e.g, cameras, induction loops, radar or laser), utilize little or no image processing capabilities, and are difficult to set-up. As images contain a lot of information, the surveillance systems purely based on vision can help avoiding the use of additional sensors, reducing the size of the sensor platform and hence increasing the flexibility and mobility. Since mobile systems often run from batteries, power consumption is a major issue and these systems should be highly energy-efficient. In this paper, we describe the heterogeneous sensor architecture of our mobile traffic surveillance system MobiTrick and its potential dynamic power management. The use of heterogeneous sensors is motivated by utilizing the 3D stereo information from the heterogeneous visual sensors to perform the required operations and thus avoiding the use of other large sensors.