A High Efficient System for Traffic Mean Speed Estimation from MPEG Video

In this paper, we present a vision-based traffic measurement system, allowing automatic traffic flow segmentation, camera calibration and traffic information estimation. The system quickly estimates mean vehicle speed directly from MPEG Motion Vectors. Although extensive work has been done in extracting and using motion information from MPEG video data in compressed domain, to our best knowledge, only few works have been dedicated to the use of MPEG motion vector for traffic analysis. The proposed system is stable and handles camera vibrations and illumination changes. The paper describes the main principles of our system together with qualitative and quantitative representative results.