Vehicle Speed Estimation Using Computer Vision and Evolutionary Camera Calibration

Abstract

Currently, the standard for vehicle speed estimation is radar or lidar speed signs which can be costly to buy and maintain. However, most major cities already implement networks of traffic surveillance cameras that can be utilized for vehicle speed estimation using computer vision. This work implements such a system using homography estimation, YOLOv4 object detector, and an object tracker capable of vehicle speed estimation. The homography component uses world plane-image plane point correspondences, located by humans. Moreover, a new method is developed specifically for this use case, using the estimation of density evolutionary algorithm. It aims at correcting the points misalignment in between planes. In addition, a basic direct linear transformation (DLT) and a random sample consensus robust version of DLT are implemented for comparison. Finally, the results show that the proposed homography method reduces the projection error from world to image point by 97%, when compared to the other two methods, and the complete workflow can successfully estimate speed distributions expected from vehicles on urban traffic and handle dynamic changes in vehicle speed.