A real-time system for vehicle detection with shadow removal and vehicle classification based on vehicle features at urban roads

Monitoring traffic in urban areas is an important task for intelligent transport applications to alleviate the traffic problems like traffic jams and long trip times. The traffic flow in urban areas is more complicated than the traffic flow in highway, due to the slow movement of vehicles and crowded traffic flows in urban areas. In this paper, a vehicle detection and classification system at intersections is proposed. The system consists of three main phases: vehicle detection, vehicle tracking and vehicle classification. In the vehicle detection, the background subtraction is utilized to detect the moving vehicles by employing mixture of Gaussians (MoGs) algorithm, and then the removal shadow algorithm is developed to improve the detection phase and eliminate the undesired detected region (shadows). After the vehicle detection phase, the vehicles are tracked until they reach the classification line. Then the vehicle dimensions are utilized to classify the vehicles into three classes (cars, bikes, and trucks). In this system, there are three counters; one counter for each class. When the vehicle is classified to a specific class, the class counter is incremented by one. The counting results can be used to estimate the traffic density at intersections, and adjust the timing of traffic light for the next light cycle. The system is applied to videos obtained by stationary cameras. The results obtained demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed system.