Object flow: A descriptor for classifying traffic motion

We present and evaluate a novel scene descriptor for classifying urban traffic by object motion. Atomic 3D flow vectors are extracted and compensated for the vehicle´s egomotion, using stereo video sequences. Votes cast by each flow vector are accumulated in a bird´s eye view histogram grid. Since we are directly using low-level object flow, no prior object detection or tracking is needed. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor by comparing it to two simpler baselines on the task of classifying more than 100 challenging video sequences into intersection and non-intersection scenarios. Our experiments reveal good classification performance in busy traffic situations, making our method a valuable complement to traditional approaches based on lane markings.