A large scale dataset for classification of vehicles in urban traffic scenes

Vehicle Classification has been a well-researched topic in the recent past. However, advances in the field have not been corroborated with deployment in Intelligent Traffic Management, due to non-availability of surveillance quality visual data of vehicles in urban traffic junctions. In this paper, we present a dataset aimed at exploring Vehicle Classification and related problems in dense, urban traffic scenarios. We present our on-going effort of collecting a large scale, surveillance quality, dataset of vehicles seen mostly on Indian roads. The dataset is an extensive collection of vehicles under different poses, scales and illumination conditions in addition to a smaller set of Near Infrared spectrum images for night time and low light traffic surveillance. We will make the dataset available for further research in this area. We propose and evaluate few baseline algorithms for the task of vehicle classification on this dataset. We also discuss challenges and potential applications of the data.