Image-Based Learning to Measure Traffic Density Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Existing methodologies to count vehicles from a road image have depended upon both hand-crafted feature engineering and rule-based algorithms. These require many predefined thresholds to detect and track vehicles. This paper provides a supervised learning methodology that requires no such feature engineering. A deep convolutional neural network was devised to count the number of vehicles on a road segment based solely on video images. The present methodology does not regard an individual vehicle as an object to be detected separately; rather, it collectively counts the number of vehicles as a human would. The test results show that the proposed methodology outperforms existing schemes.