Traffic observation, analysis and classification with a stereo camera system : first results and comparisons.

For several years video based traffic measurement systems have been available on a commercial basis. Whereas the first systems in the 80s suffered either from more or less primitive algorithms due to insufficient computing power or from expensive parallel processing hardware, most of the systems proposed and offered in the 90s make use of commercial single processor hardware to keep costs competitive. Despite the use of cheap and fast processors together with sophisticated and well investigated image processing algorithms there is a lack of systems operating with high accuracy especially under difficult environmental conditions. Many of the deficiencies are due to the dependence on monocular video sequences. At the 3rd World Congress on ITS in Orlando the authors presented a new stereo based video sensor concept. This paper reports the first test implementations and results.