Mobile Active‐Vision Traffic Surveillance System for Urban Networks

Abstract: This article discusses the development of a mobile bus‐mounted machine vision system for transit and traffic monitoring in urban corridors, as required by intelligent transportation systems. In contrast to earlier machine vision technologies used for traffic management, which rely mainly on fixed‐point detection and simpler algorithms to detect certain traffic characteristics, the new proposed approach makes use of a recent trend in computer vision research; namely, the active vision paradigm. Active vision systems have mechanisms that can actively control camera parameters such as orientation, focus, zoom, and vergence in response to the requirements of the task and external stimuli. Mounting active vision systems on buses will have the advantage of providing real‐time feedback of the current traffic conditions, while possessing the intelligence and visual skills that allow them to interact with a rapidly changing dynamic environment, such as moving traffic and continuously changing image background.