MIO-TCD: A New Benchmark Dataset for Vehicle Classification and Localization

The ability to train on a large dataset of labeled samples is critical to the success of deep learning in many domains. In this paper, we focus on motor vehicle classification and localization from a single video frame and introduce the “Miovision traffic camera dataset” (MIO-TCD) in this context. MIO-TCD is the largest dataset for motorized traffic analysis to date. It includes 11 traffic object classes such as cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. It contains 786 702 annotated images acquired at different times of the day and different periods of the year by hundreds of traffic surveillance cameras deployed across Canada and the United States. The dataset consists of two parts: a “localization dataset,” containing 137 743 full video frames with bounding boxes around traffic objects and a “classification dataset,” containing 648 959 crops of traffic objects from the 11 classes. We also report the results from the 2017 CVPR MIO-TCD Challenge that leveraged this dataset and compare them with the results of the state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. These results demonstrate the viability of deep learning methods for vehicle localization and classification from a single video frame in real-life traffic scenarios. The top-performing methods achieve both accuracy and Kappa score above 96% on the classification dataset and mean-average precision of 77% on the localization dataset. We also identify the scenarios in which the state-of-the-art methods still fail, and we suggest avenues to address these challenges. Both the dataset and detailed results are publicly available online.