A shadow handler in traffic monitoring system

A typical shadow-eliminating algorithm is presented in this paper. Algorithms for vehicle detection, edge detection and shadow detection are also given. If the shadow is not separated from the vehicle, the next traffic control processes, like vehicle classification, tracking and speed calculation, will be rather difficult. Our approach for shadow processing runs in real time in low-cost hardware. The knowledge, such as heading of roads, date and time, can be efficient used in the algorithm. First we detect moving vehicles in a sequence of image. In this way, we need not process the whole image, which saves computation time. Then we separate shades from vehicles using knowledge including results of edges detection, road direction, etc. The results of the algorithm are also given in the final of the paper, which shows that this algorithm is quite promising. Keyword: Traffic system, image sequence, gray values, vehicle detection, heading of roads, background adaptation, edge detection, shadow detection, shadow separation.