A window-based image processing approach for real-time road traffic analysis

Various researchers for a number of years have investigated traffic data collection and analysis. Many techniques have been proposed to speed up the operations and some intelligent approaches have been developed to compensate the effects of lighting, shadows and occlusions. To achieve real-time processing, it is necessary to reduce the amount of data to be processed, so the first question is to determine the suitable location for the key regions or windows. Previously, researchers have either used full frame processing approach, which requires more computing power and thus is not practical for real-time applications, or have used window-based techniques, but defining of windows was done manually, which is not practical in real-world traffic applications. In this paper, an automatic approach is described to measure the size and location of windows required for this purpose. The results demonstrate that this method provides better results than the fixed window size.