MULTIPLE VEHICLE TRACKING AND SPEED ESTIMATION USING OPTICAL FLOW METHOD

Abstract

The dissertation presents a novel velocity estimation method for ground vehicles. We will analyze here an extremely simple model that already exhibits quite complicated behavior. We consider a one-lane road with a number of cars on it. MATLAB and SIMULINK are good tools for studying models of such behavior. The system developed currently uses MATLAB 7.0 R2006B. The task here is to compute direction of motion of vehicle, graphically represent the vehicle trajectory and automatically estimate vehicle speed from video sequences acquired with a fixed mounted camera. The method uses optical flow algorithm to calculate changes in the intensity of the pixels of the images. These apparent velocity components are then subjected to various image processing techniques to obtain centroid of the vehicle across the frames. The distance traveled by the vehicle is calculated using the movement of the centroid over the frames. The image coordinates of the centroid are mapped to World space. The...