A shadow handler in a video-based real-time traffic monitoring system

A video-based system for traffic monitoring is presented. The objective of the system is to set up a high-level description of the traffic scene comprising the position, speed and class of the vehicles. Algorithms for detecting moving objects, separating the vehicles from their shadows, tracking and classification are presented. The classification of vehicles under sunny conditions is very difficult, if the shadow isn´t separated from the vehicles. This approach for classification runs in real-time on low-cost hardware. the shadow can be separated from the vehicle and the knowledge about the shape of the shadow can be efficiently used. The shadow analysis algorithm itself uses high-level knowledge about the geometry of the scene (heading of the observed road) and about global data (date and time)