Real-Time Detection of Moving Vehicles

Computer vision-based traffic flow monitoring is of major importance for enforcing traffic management policies. Information such as the number of vehicles passing on a road per time unit, or vehicles' turning rates at intersections are exploited by traffic management policies to supervise traffic-light timings. Computer vision-based traffic flow monitoring requires extraction of moving vehicles from traffic scenes in real time. To accomplish this task, efficient algorithms must be used and effective, lowcost hardware implementation must be pursued. This paper first describes the algorithms used in VTTS (Vehicular Traffic Tracking System) to achieve segmentation of moving vehicles. Then, hardware implementation on a re-programmable FPGA-based board is described in detail.