Real-time risk assessment of road vehicles based on inverse perspective mapping

Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras play an important role in traffic scenes due to their wide monitoring fields and high flexibility. However, since the focal length and angle of PTZ cameras change irregularly with the monitoring needs, it is difficult to obtain accurate physical information about the real world from the image information of PTZ cameras. Aiming to address the need for real-time risk assessment of road vehicles in traffic monitoring scenarios, a vehicle position and velocity measurement scheme based on camera inverse perspective transformation is proposed, along with a method for real-time risk assessment based on the position and velocity. Specifically, Firstly, the vehicle target in the video is detected and tracked by deep learning YOLO detection algorithm and optical flow tracking algorithm. According to the obtained trajectory set, the vanishing points in the road direction are calculated by Cascade Hough Transform and the road marking lines are detected. Then, according to the vanishing point and marking line, the camera calibration task is accomplished via exploratory focal length. After camera calibration, the camera-to-road inverse perspective transformation is applied to project the image plane onto the road surface and obtain, the actual position information of vehicles. Finally, the vehicle speed measurement and real-time road risk assessment are achieved by calculating the average of instantaneous velocities across multiple frames. Simulation experiment results in a traffic monitoring scenario demonstrate that this perspective-based method for real-time road vehicle risk assessment achieves good stability and practicality, which meets the requirements for vehicle speed measurement and real-time road risk assessment.