Vehicle trajectories evaluation by static video sensors

Metrology of vehicle trajectories has several applications in the field of road safety, particularly in dangerous curves. Actually, it is of great interest to observe trajectories of vehicles with the aim of designing a real time driver warning device in dangerous areas. This paper addresses the first step of a work with a video system placed along the road with the objective of vehicle's position and speed estimation. This system has been totally developed for this project and can record simultaneously three cameras with 640 times 480 pixels up to 30 frames per second (fps) and rangefinder informations. The best contribution of this paper is an original probabilistic background subtraction algorithm, first step of a global method (calibration, tracking, ...) implemented to be able to measure vehicle trajectories. Kinematic GPS (in post-processing) has been extensively used to get ground truth