AUTOMATIC VEHICLE IMAGE EXTRACTION BASED ON SPATIOTEMPORAL IMAGE-ANALYSIS

This paper proposes an automatic method of extracting the image of a vehicle moving along a straight road from a sequential video image. The method has been designed to be independent of the type of vehicle and the background, and to obtain an image with minimum defective areas. The image of the vehicle is extracted by analyzing a locus in a spatio-temporal image seen through a slit in a fixed video camera, by updating the background image and superimposing a time-series of the background difference image. The method can extract a full image of various types of vehicles in an arbitrary background with minimum defects, and can separate the images of two vehicles when one crosses in front of the other. The method has been tested successfully with actual traffic (including traffic starting from a traffic light). The results show that the method is practical for smoothly flowing traffic. The method has also been tested successfully for identifying vehicle types.