This article describes Velec's Mercure system, which has been used for two years as part of a full automatic incident detection system (AID) developed through the collaboration of French road operators, researchers, and manufacturers. Mercure consists of traffic analysis and interpretation software, which preprocesses a digitised signal from video cameras to improve image quality, then performs space-time monitoring of traffic and incidents. It provides an original way to standardise the basic blocks of image processing, allowing various remote intelligent systems to be built to match existing and future network architectures. Mercure detects any stopped vehicle, and locates the lanes where the incident has occurred; detection occurs equally well in free flowing and congested traffic. Evaluations in independent trials showed a 99.1% detection rate of stops in congestion, and a very low false alarm rate. Mercure is an active video surveillance system for image analysis, compression, and transmission.
Abstract