Mobile vision-based vehicle tracking and traffic control

This paper discusses work-in-progress to develop a mobile, bus-mounted machine vision system for transit and traffic monitoring in urban corridors, as required by Intelligent Transportation Systems. In contrast to earlier machine vision technologies used for traffic management, which mainly rely on simple algorithms to detect certain traffic characteristics, the new proposed approach makes use of a recent trend in computer vision research: namely the active vision paradigm. Active vision systems have mechanisms that can actively control camera parameters, such as orientation, focus, zoom, and convergence, in response to the requirements of the task and external stimuli. Mounting active vision systems on buses will have the advantage of providing real-time feedback of the current traffic conditions while possessing the intelligence and visual skills which allow them to interact with a rapidly changing dynamic environment such as moving traffic.