Vehicle Color Recognition on Urban Road by Feature Context

Vehicle information recognition is a key component of intelligent transportation systems. Color plays an important role in vehicle identification. As a vehicle has its inner structure, the main challenge of vehicle color recognition is to select the region of interest (ROI) for recognizing its dominant color. In this paper, we propose a method to implicitly select the ROI for color recognition. Preprocessing is performed to overcome the influence of image quality degradation. Then, the ROI in vehicle images is selected by assigning the subregions with different weights that are learned by a classifier trained on the vehicle images. We train the classifier by linear support vector machine for its efficiency and high precision. The experiments are extensively validated on both images and videos, which are collected on urban roads. The proposed method outperforms other competing color recognition methods.