Real-time visual detection and tracking system for traffic monitoring

Computer vision systems for traffic monitoring represent an essential tool for a broad range of traffic surveillance applications. Two of the most noteworthy challenges for these systems are the real-time operation with hundreds of vehicles and the total occlusions which hinder the tracking of the vehicles. In this paper, we present a traffic monitoring approach that deals with these two challenges based on three modules: detection, tracking and data association. First, vehicles are identified through a deep learning based detector. Second, tracking is performed with a combination of a Discriminative Correlation Filter and a Kalman Filter. This permits to estimate the tracking error in order to make tracking more robust and reliable. Finally, the data association through the Hungarian algorithm combines the information of the previous steps. The contributions are: (i) a real-time traffic monitoring system robust to occlusions that can process more than four hundred vehicles simultaneously; and (ii) the application of the system to anomaly detection in traffic and roundabout input/output analysis. The system has been evaluated with more than two thousand vehicles in real-life videos.