T3wT: tracking turning trucks with trailers

A system for model-based tracking of road vehicles in digitized video sequences of traffic scenes has been generalized to handle “truck-and-trailer”-configurations. Whereas, previously, each vehicle had been modeled as a single rigid polyhedron, the generalisation handles two or more rigid components modeled as polyhedra with (one degree of freedom) rotational joints between consecutive components. Such an approach could be kept simple by incorporating the steering angle for the front wheels of each component into the overall state vector to be estimated. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by the evaluation of three image sequences with different truck-and-trailer configurations recorded at various inner-city road intersections