Estimating OD matrices at intersections in airborne video - A pilot study

This paper presents a pilot study towards estimating complex traffic flow parameters in airborne video. The study presents two prototype software systems attempting to solve intermediate tasks in recovering microscopic OD (origin-destination) matrices at complex road intersections. The first system employs background modelling in order to estimate the OD matrix of an intersection imaged by a fixed camera. The second system explores the feasibility of applying such approach to input video acquired from a hovering aircraft by pre-warping the whole video towards the coordinates of the first frame. The experimental part presents performance evaluation of the two prototype systems on real traffic videos acquired from a tall building and a non-rigid airship. The paper is concluded by discussing the achieved baseline performance and proposing suitable directions for future research.