Solar-Powered Automated Road Surveillance System for Speed Violation Detection

In this paper, a real-time solar-powered road surveillance system is proposed to detect and report moving vehicles that violate the speed limit. The system is designed to operate as a standalone with no connection to the main power line and the wired communication networks. It is powered by a battery array that is charged through solar panels. The data communication with the authorized remote station is achieved via wireless communication technology. A dedicated digital signal processing chip is used to exploit computationally inexpensive image-processing techniques over the video sequence captured from the fixed position video camera for estimating the speed of the moving vehicles. The moving vehicles are detected by analyzing the binary image sequences that are constructed from the captured frames by employing the interframe difference or the background subtraction techniques. A novel adaptive thresholding method is proposed to binarize the outputs from the interframe difference and the background subtraction techniques. The detected moving vehicles are tracked to estimate their speeds. The images of the speeding vehicles are further analyzed to detect license plate image regions according to the predefined color information of the license plates in Northern Cyprus. The detected license plate image regions are reported to the authorized remote station.