Vehicle pose estimation for vehicle detection and tracking based on road direction

Abstract

Vehicle has several types and each of them has different color, size, and shape. The appearance of vehicle also changes if viewed from different viewpoint of traffic surveillance camera. This situation can create many possibilities of vehicle poses. However, the one in common, vehicle pose usually follows road direction. Therefore, this research proposes a method to estimate the pose of vehicle for vehicle detection and tracking based on road direction. Vehicle training data are generated from 3D vehicle models in four-pair orientation categories. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Linear-Support Vector Machine (Linear-SVM) are used to build vehicle detectors from the data. Road area is extracted from traffic surveillance image to localize the detection area. The pose of vehicle which estimated based on road direction will be used to select a suitable vehicle detector for vehicle detection process. To obtain the final vehicle object, vehicle line checking method is applied to the vehicle detection result. Finally, vehicle tracking is performed to give label on each vehicle. The test conducted on various viewpoints of traffic surveillance camera shows that the method effectively detects and tracks vehicle by estimating the pose of vehicle. Performance evaluation of the proposed method shows 0.9170 of accuracy and 0.9161 of balance accuracy (BAC).