Vehicle detection and tracking for freeway traffic monitoring

An image processing and object tracking approach is proposed for the design of a video-based freeway traffic monitoring system. Proper estimation of the traffic speed in different lanes of a freeway allows for timely detection of possible congestions. The proposed method consists of a road modeling stage and a vehicle tracking stage. In the first stage, a three-dimensional model of the background road image is generated. In the tracking stage, each car in the scene is isolated and tracked over many frames. Experimental results on frame sequences taken from Santa Ana area freeways are presented.<<ETX>>