A multiple directions turning vehicle counting method at intersections based on arbitrary-oriented detection and stack Long Short-Term Memory

Abstract

The traffic flow parameters of turning vehicles at urban road intersections play an important role in the intelligent traffic system. Traffic road monitoring is difficult to cover large intersection scenes. With the application of unmanned aerial vehicles in traffic, drone-based intersection monitoring has great potential due to the large perspective. But there is rarely research on multiple turning vehicle counting at intersections based on drones. A few existing multiple turning vehicle counting methods are based on vehicle detection and tracking methods. However, the vehicles at the intersection have various orientations, the accurate information of the vehicle cannot be obtained by detection, and the tracking process is complicated and redundant for the counting task. Based on the traffic video at intersections taken by unmanned aerial vehicles, we propose a eight turnings vehicle counting model without complex tracking. Firstly, a spatial attention and channel adaptive attention model net is proposed for arbitrary-oriented vehicle detection to get the orientation and position of vehicles. Secondly, a turning spatio-temporal counting feature for different turning vehicles and its extraction method are proposed. Finally, the stack Long Short-Term Memory net based counting model is designed to process the turning spatio-temporal counting feature and counting eight different turnings vehicles at intersection. The experiments show that the proposed method can realize counting eight different turnings vehicles simultaneously in drone-based traffic video at the intersection without relying on complex multi-target tracking. The average counting accuracy has reached 98.18\%.