Special issue on vision applications and technology for intelligent vehicles: part I-infrastructure

T HIS Special Issue contains revised papers originally pre-It attracted 383 participants from 17 countries. Immediately after this conference, in order to report on its success, we (Broggi, Ikeuchi, and Thorpe) decided to have a special issue in this newly created IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, by collecting some of the most important papers presented at the conference. For convenience, the papers of this special event will be divided into two parts—this, the first part, focused on infrastructure and the second part, to be published in the September 2000 issue, focused on the vehicle. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will be a key technology in the next century. ITS aims to control the flow of people, vehicles, and information to achieve a seamless infor-mation/transportation space. Through this effort, ITS aims to provide drivers and passengers a safer, more comfortable, and more efficient transportation space. ITS requires complex integrated efforts over all aspects of engineering and science, including computer science and robotics, artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and civil engineering , to name a few. Among these vast areas, sensing is one of the most important components in ITS. Generally speaking, any intelligent system requires sensing capabilities. Without knowledge of the outside world acquired through sensing, intelligent systems cannot make any decisions or control their behavior. The integrated intelligent transportation system is no exception. Each intelligent vehicle, as one component of an ITS, needs sensing capabilities of its environment for making any decisions to navigate, to provide timely assistance to the driver, and to avoid accidents in emergency situations. The infrastructure, in particular intelligent highways, needs sensing capabilities to determine road conditions as well as to monitor events occurring on them, in order to assist vehicles for route guidance or accident warning. Even human drivers inside the vehicles, in particular senior citizens, need automated sensing capabilities to improve or enhance their visual capabilities for such purposes as pedestrian detection or road sign monitoring. The five papers included in Part I cover various sensing capabilities of the infrastructure. These papers are concerned with sensing capabilities of the infrastructure, including flow measurement for intelligent route guidance and event recognition for accident warning. Pavlidis et al., describe a method to recognize vehicles using infrared sensors, while Lai and Yung describe a method to identify vehicle type using virtual loops. Daileyet al. report an algorithm to estimate vehicle speed using vision sensors. These intelligent …