An intelligent image processing sensor - the algorithm and the hardware implementation

This paper describes the idea and the implementation of the robust algorithm dedicated to extraction of moving vehicles from real-time camera images for the evaluation of traffic parameters, such as the number of vehicles, their direction of movement and their approximate speed. The authors, apart from the careful selection of particular steps of the algorithm towards hardware implementation, also proposed novel improvements, resulting in increasing the robustness and the efficiency. A single, stationary, monochrome camera is used, simple shadow and highlight elimination is performed. The occlusions are not taken into account, due to placing the camera at a location high above the road. The algorithm is designed and implemented in pipelined hardware in FPGA, therefore high frame-rate efficiency has been achieved. The possible applications of the proposed algorithm and its implementation are in the area of intelligent image processing sensors in low-power, cost-effective sensor network applications, i.e. for detecting the moving vehicles on the road.