Algorithms and architectures for the analysis of road-traffic movements

Under certain circumstances automatic data-capture systems based upon image processing techniques and applied to road-traffic situations offer significant advantage over more conventional techniques such as those employing inductive-loop detectors in that they are portable and do not require installation into the carriageway. The techniques have further potential in the areas of incident detection, especially in motorway situations. They also offer the possibility of in-depth investigation of such situations as vehicle turning movements and vehicle tracking more generally. This paper describes recent progress which has been made in considering effective segmentation techniques on one hand subsequent tracking analysis on the other. The objective is progress toward economical and versatile target architectures operating in real-time. In both cases performance characteristics based upon simulation are presented