Rear-View Vehicle Detection and Tracking by Combining Multiple Parts for Complex Urban Surveillance

Traffic surveillance is an important topic in intelligent transportation systems. Robust vehicle detection and tracking is one challenging problem for complex urban traffic surveillance. This paper proposes a rear-view vehicle detection and tracking method based on multiple vehicle salient parts using a stationary camera. We show that spatial modeling of these vehicle parts is crucial for overall performance. First, the vehicle is treated as an object composed of multiple salient parts, including the license plate and rear lamps. These parts are localized using their distinctive color, texture, and region feature. Furthermore, the detected parts are treated as graph nodes to construct a probabilistic graph using a Markov random field model. After that, the marginal posterior of each part is inferred using loopy belief propagation to get final vehicle detection. Finally, the vehicles' trajectories are estimated using a Kalman filter, and a tracking-based detection technique is realized. Experiments in practical urban scenarios are carried out under various weather conditions. It can be shown that our method adapts to partial occlusion and various lighting conditions. Experiments also show that our method can achieve real-time performance.