A Smart Traffic Control System Based on Pixel-Labeling and SORT Tracker

Autonomous vehicle detection and tracking are crucial for intelligent transportation management and control systems. Although many techniques are used to develop smart traffic systems, this article discusses vehicle detection and tracking using pixel-labeling and real-time tracking. We propose a novel smart traffic control system that segments the image using an Extreme Gradient Boost (XGBoost) classifier to extract the foreground objects. The proposed model is divided into the following steps: 1) at first, all the images are preprocessed to remove noise; 2) pixel-labeling is performed by using the XGBoost classifier to separate the background from the foreground; 3) all the pixels classified as a vehicle was extracted and converted into a binary image, then blob extraction technique is used to localize each vehicle; 4) to verify the detected vehicles Intersection over Union (IoU) score using the ground truth is calculated; 5) all verified vehicles were subjected to Visual Geometry Group (VGG) feature extraction and based on which a unique identifier was assigned to each of them to enable multi-object tracking across the image frames; 6) vehicles are counted and categorized into stationary and moving cars by detecting motion in each of them using Farneback optical flow algorithm; and 7) finally, the Simple Online and Real-time Tracker (SORT) is used for tracking. The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art traffic monitoring techniques in terms of precision, achieving 0.86 for detection and 0.92 for tracking with the Karlsruher Institut for Technology Aerial Image Sequences (KIT-AIS) dataset, 0.83 for detection, and 0.87 for tracking with the Vision Meets Drone Single Object-Tracking (VisDrone) dataset. The proposed system can be used for several purposes, such as vehicle identification in traffic, traffic density detection at intersections, traffic flow conditions on the road, and providing a pedestrian way.