On the use of Video Content Analysis in ITS : A review from academic to commercial applications

Stand-alone cameras or CCTV networks are nowadays commonly present in public areas such as city centers, stores and more recently in transportation infrastructures. In the meantime, automatic processing of video data is a field of activity stirring up the utmost attention in the pattern recognition community; state-of-the-art advances in this area enable the reliable extraction of features and the investigation of numerous applications dedicated to ITS. A first obvious field of application of Video Content Analysis (VCA) consists in improving safety and security in transport's context. Embedded VCA in vehicles can track pedestrians to avoid collisions, improving safety. Used in railway station, VCA are able to detect left luggage allowing to enhance security. Video streams available from such installations may also represent a useful source of information for statistical transportation applications, e.g. monitoring of road traffic conditions or providing accurate counting statistics in railway/subway stations. This paper proposes an overview of the VCA applications in terms of safety, security and efficiency for ITS, with a specific focus on the usability of such VCA systems (emerging research topics, state-of-the-art studies, already commercialized applications, etc).