A Novel Particle Filter Implementation for a Multiple-Vehicle Detection and Tracking System using Tail Light Segmentation

This paper proposes a vision-based multiple vehicle automatic detection and tracking system which can be applied in different environments. To detect vehicles, tail light position is utilized for fast vehicle candidate localization. A back propagation neural network (BPNN) trained by a Gabor feature set is used. BPNN verifies vehicle candidates and ensures detection system robustness. In the vehicle tracking step, to overcome multiple vehicle tracking challenges, partial vehicle occlusion and temporarily missing vehicle problems, this paper propose a novel method implementing a particle filter. The color probability distribution function (CPDF) of detected vehicles is used twice in the vehicle tracking sub-system. Firstly, CPDF is adopted to seek potential target vehicle locations; secondly, CPDF is used to measure the similarity of each particle for target vehicle position estimation. Because of various illuminations or target vehicle distances, the same vehicle will generate different CPDFs; the initial CPDF cannot guarantee long-term different scale vehicle tracking. To overcome these problems, an accurate tracking result, which is chosen by a trained BPNN, is used to update target vehicle CPDF. In our experiments, the proposed algorithm showed 84% accuracy in vehicle detection. Videos collected from highways, urban roads and campuses are tested in our system. The system performance makes it appropriate for real applications.