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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
A Novel System for Nighttime Vehicle Detection
Based on Foveal Classifiers With
Real-Time Performance
Andrés Bell , Tomás Mantecón , César Díaz , Carlos R. del-Blanco ,
Fernando Jaureguizar , and Narciso García , Member, IEEE
Abstract— Vehicle monitoring using camera networks is an
important task for traffic applications. Moreover, it becomes
critical in nighttime, when the probability of an accident consider-
ably increases as visibility conditions worsen. Typical approaches
are mostly based on the assumption that regions delimiting
vehicle lights are well defined, so that they are segmented and
then associated to vehicle entities. However, this assumption fails
in images acquired by existing traffic camera networks, where
vehicle lights are revealed as flashes and other complex light
patterns, occupying large and even disconnected image regions.
In this work, a real-time vehicle detection algorithm for nighttime
situations has been presented, which is able to locate vehicles
in the image by analyzing the previous complex light patterns.
For this purpose, a novel machine learning framework based on
a grid of foveal classifiers has been designed. Every classifier
in the grid processes the same global image descriptor (only
one descriptor is computed per image). However, every one
of them is trained to predict a different output depending on
the classifier position in the grid and the vehicle ground-truth
location. Additionally, only point-based annotations are required
to train the grid of foveal classifiers, speeding up the cost of
creating the required databases. Experimental results prove the
effectiveness of the proposed method in a new created nighttime
database with point-based annotations.
Index Terms— Foveal classifiers, nighttime, point-based anno-
tations, real-time, vehicle recognition.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)
has been a subject of growing interest in recent years
coinciding with a considerable increase in the number of
vehicles on the road worldwide [1]. This concurrence is due to
the fact that more vehicles mean more problematic situations,
such as traffic congestion and circulation accidents [2], which
Manuscript received October 28, 2019; revised April 23, 2020,
July 15, 2020, and October 20, 2020; accepted January 15, 2021. This work
was supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Univer-
sidades (AEI/FEDER) of the Spanish Government under Project TEC2016-
75981 (IVME) and in part by the NVIDIA Corporation with the Donation
of the Titan Xp GPU. The Associate Editor for this article was K. Wang.
(Corresponding author: Tomás Mantecón.)
The authors are with the Grupo de Tratamiento de Imágenes, Information
Processing and Telecommunications Center and ETSI Telecomunicación,
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain, and also with the
ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid,
Spain (e-mail: abn@gti.ssr.upm.es, tmv@gti.ssr.upm.es; cdm@gti.ssr.upm.es;
cda@gti.ssr.upm.es; fjn@gti.ssr.upm.es; narciso@gti.ssr.upm.es).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITS.2021.3053863
1558-0016 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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1
can be totally or partially avoided through the use of auto-
matic systems for traffic management. Therefore, there exists
extensive literature addressing different particular problems
closely related to those situations, like vehicle detection [3],
collision avoidance [4], pedestrian and cyclist recognition [5],
license plate identification [6], traffic monitoring [7], driver
assistance [8], or self-guided vehicles [9].
In the state of the art, works relying on very different types
of sensors can be found, such as LIDAR [10], RADAR [11],
and cameras [12]. The latter are of special interest, given the
staggering number of video cameras that can be found in
all kinds of scenarios, from static cameras oriented to traffic
monitoring and/or surveillance up to vehicle onboard cameras.
The work presented in this paper belongs to this group.
Most works based on visual imagery are restricted to day-
time situations with favorable weather conditions [13], [14].
In comparison, there are few works dealing with images
captured under poor illumination conditions, that is, basically,
in bad weather (e.g. rain, fog, snow…) or during night-
time [15]. However, these cases are key to properly tackle
traffic problems, as the probability of an accident considerably
increases under reduced visibility conditions. Moreover, most
existing methods working with this type of imagery are
focused on unfavorable weather conditions [4], [16], [17], [18]
rather than on nighttime situations, which, however, are more
frequent and even more challenging. Indeed, in nighttime,
vehicles are often represented in the image by just one or
several distorted lights (see Fig. 1 for an example). Thus, their
shape is usually virtually lost. This is especially common in
real traffic camera networks that are subject to practical and
economical restrictions (no high dynamic range capability,
bandwidth limitations, etc.). In summary, there is a lack
of strategies that satisfactorily face this key but challenging
situation.
Most works addressing the task of nighttime vehicle detec-
tion are based on the detection of vehicle front or rear
lights [19]. In particular, in [20], the authors aim at finding
vehicle rear lights. Haar-like features over gray-level images
are computed, which are then delivered to a modified version
of the Adaboost classifier [21] to allow active learning. This
is also the basis of the work by Dave et al. [22], focused
on recognizing just one of the vehicle rear lamps. For this
purpose, a color segmentation algorithm is applied to detect
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Fig. 1. Examples of nighttime images with flashes and complex illumination
patterns. Observe that the shape of the vehicles in the input image in (a) is lost,
and only distorted lights can be appreciated. Additionally, in (b), the bright
regions produced by the vehicle lights (spotlights and the projected light on
the road) are even disconnected.
bright blobs in the HSV color space. Then, the Color Inherited
Optical Flow (CIOF) algorithm [23] is used to track the
blobs. In [24], vehicle detection is performed by detecting the
brake light. To that end, they propose a three-step algorithm.
First, a contrast enhancement technique is applied over the
whole RGB image. Second, the brake light is detected using a
Nakagami distribution model. Finally, an adaptive threshold is
computed to confirm or reject the previous selection of brake
light candidates. The work by Zhang et al. [25] addresses the
detection of vehicle headlights by means of a combination
of a reflection intensity map and a reflection-suppressed map,
which are obtained from the analysis of a light attenuation
model. Then, a bidirectional reasoning algorithm is used to
track the lights, and the resulting trajectories are used to
estimate the speed of the vehicle. Shan et al. [26] also propose
to detect headlights. A segmentation algorithm over image
intensity values is used to extract candidates. Then, lights
belonging to the same car are matched using a distance crite-
rion. In [27], both rear and headlights are detected by using
a bright object segmentation process based on a multilevel
histogram thresholding algorithm. The segmentation output is
refined by a connected-component filtering of the brightest
objects. The main problem with all the previous works is that
they use sequences captured under not-so-severe illumination
conditions, in which it can be assumed that vehicle lights
are always well defined. However, this is actually not the
case for many existing traffic camera networks. In most
occasions, vehicle lights are heavily distorted, blinding the
camera, or producing large bright regions and artifacts that
occupy substantial portions of the image (see Fig. 1 and
Fig. 8). These effects make very hard, or even impossible,
to individually identify the lights, and so to carry out the
proposed methods successfully.
Other works are focused on detecting not only the lights,
but also the entire vehicle. In [28], they detect vehicles using
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the classifier of Deformable Part Models (DPM) with infrared
imagery. In [29], the positions of the vehicles are predicted
using Local Binary Patterns (LBP) along with an Adaboost
detector. The result is refined by a KAZE-based bag-of-words
strategy. The work in [30] investigates local patterns in depth
imagery to improve the performance of state-of-the-art region
proposal networks. In [31], the detection is based on the Active
Basis Model (ABM) that uses edge information. Then, shape
symmetry is used to discard false positives, followed by a
random forest algorithm that classifies the different types of
vehicles. However, as before, these approaches cannot be used
indiscriminately, as they either use specialized hardware to
‘see’ in the dark to emphasize the outline of vehicles, such as
infrared or thermal cameras [32], or they assume that the vehi-
cles’ shape is sufficiently distinguishable without using this
kind of hardware. With respect to the first assumption, traffic
camera networks typically do not include specialized cameras
because of their high cost. Regarding the second, in the same
way as for lights, vehicle shapes cannot usually be sufficiently
well distinguished if illumination conditions are hard enough,
as glinting and blinding lights produce arbitrary bright regions
in the images. This is the scenario considered in this paper.
Therefore, in this paper, a real-time algorithm for vehicle
detection in nighttime scenarios that successfully faces pre-
vious challenges without making unrealistic assumptions is
presented. The proposed method uses existing traffic camera
networks that lack specialized camera sensors (such as infrared
or thermal ones) to deal with complex and poorly illuminated
images with heavily distorted lights, where neither the vehicle
lights nor the vehicle shape can be identified most of the
time. Since the light beams produced by the vehicles typically
cover large image areas, much larger than the space occupied
by the actual vehicle shape, a global image descriptor per
frame is used, which is delivered to a new grid of foveal
classifiers that cooperatively determine the location of the
vehicles in the scene. On top of that, the foveal classifiers
use point-based annotations for the training process, speeding
up the creation of the required databases, and in turn reducing
costs and deployment time of the proposed system. Although
a general framework is proposed, the system can be almost
directly applied to different purposes (e.g. instantaneous or
over-time vehicle count to indicate traffic occupation, simple
tracking of detections to predict vehicle failures or potential
collisions…). In addition, other specific problematic situations
could be addressed by performing an application-oriented
post-processing of the results.
The organization of the paper is as follows. Section II
describes the proposed vehicle detection algorithm. Section III
introduces the created point-based database. Section IV sum-
marizes the obtained results with different variants of the
proposed framework and makes a comparison with other state-
of-the-art works. Finally, conclusions and future work are
drawn in Section V.
II. A LGORITHM D ESCRIPTION
The framework proposed in this work for the detection of
vehicles under nighttime conditions is based on the use of a
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BELL et al.: NOVEL SYSTEM FOR NVD BASED ON FOVEAL CLASSIFIERS WITH REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
grid of foveal classifiers, which is able to successfully manage
unshaped light patterns using a global image descriptor and
point-based annotations. Foveal classifiers are focused on a
specific zone of the image (the fovea), and so their output
is limited to that area. However, their inputs are global, that
is, they refer to the whole image. Furthermore, the size and
shape of the output zone or fovea are not manually specified,
but intrinsically learned in the training process, since the
inputs, despite being global, contain the information related
to this fovea. This fact allows that an individual classifier can
accurately locate vehicles in the image, despite their visual
appearance being just bright regions covering large image
areas, much larger than the actual space occupied by them.
Additionally, point-based annotations are used instead of
bounding boxes, as they present two important advantages.
First, under poor illumination conditions, the shape of the
vehicles is not clear at all, and therefore bounding boxes are
extremely difficult to place in the scene (even for generating
ground-truth annotations). Second, by using points, the system
deployment is sped up and its cost reduced. The reason is
that the creation of the required databases with point-based
annotations is significantly quicker than with bounding-box
annotations. In this regard, note that the annotation time not
only increases with the number of annotation points (two
for bounding boxes and one for points), but also due to
the fact that, when working with bounding-box annotations,
the operator has to deal with changes in the object size, which
is not the case with point-based annotations.
The proposed framework can be implemented using differ-
ent global image descriptors and types of classifiers. Below,
a detailed description of the framework is offered using an
evolution of the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) as
the image descriptor, and Support Vector Machines (SVM)
as the type of classifier used in the grid. This combination
is especially appealing due to its computational efficiency
using only a standard PC. However, the framework has been
also implemented using other global image descriptors (based
on Haar wavelets, LBP, and pretrained VGG16 and ResNet
features) and classifiers (neural networks -NN-). These are
briefly described in Section IV along with a comparison of
the results obtained by the different implementations of the
proposed framework.
The block diagram of the proposed machine learning frame-
work, shown in Fig. 2, is divided into two phases: prediction
system and training system.
1) Prediction System: The prediction system phase predicts
point-based vehicle locations in input images by using a set
of learned models obtained in the training system phase. The
prediction system can be further divided into three stages
(see left part of Fig. 2): 1) Computation of the global image
descriptor, 2) Prediction of a score map using the grid of
classifiers, and 3) Vehicle location determination. In the first
stage, Computation of the global image descriptor, a method
that computes a feature vector for representing a whole image
is required. For this purpose, multiple alternatives can be used
from the literature, although in the current implementation,
an evolution of HOG [33] has been used, as this descriptor
has been proven to obtain good results in solving pattern
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3
classification problems, and allows real-time performance.
Nonetheless, additional image global descriptors have been
implemented and tested, as it is described in Section IV.
Subsection II-A describes in more detail the proposed global
image descriptor, called Global HOG (GHOG). Note that
a unique descriptor per image is computed, unlike existing
works that generate a myriad of descriptors per image, corre-
sponding to different image regions. Thus, the computational
cost of the feature extraction task is heavily reduced, boosting
real-time operation without the need of specialized hardware.
The second stage, Prediction of a score map using the grid
of classifiers, receives as input the GHOG descriptor to be
processed by the grid of foveal classifiers. Again, any type of
classifier can be employed in this stage, if it suits the require-
ments of the system. In the current implementation, SVMs are
used (although Section IV describes additional results obtained
using other types of classifiers) along with an associated 2D
reference point, in such a way that all of them form a 2D grid.
The output is a score map (arranged as the previous grid) in
which a high positive value indicates that a vehicle is close
to the reference point of the corresponding foveal classifier.
As each classifier has all the image information, it can deal
effectively with the nighttime scenarios, where the light pat-
terns that vehicles produce can cover large image areas, even
disconnected ones. Regarding the SVMs, a linear kernel has
been chosen to allow real-time performance in the recognition
stage. On the other hand, the specific configuration of the grid
of foveal classifiers is defined by the geometric arrangement
of their reference points and the total number of classifiers.
A regular hexagonal geometric pattern is used in this work,
as in this way the closest neighbors of any element of the grid
are at the same distance from this element [34]. Fig. 3 shows
an example of this pattern, where each green point represents
the reference point of each classifier. The number of classifiers
in the grid can be adapted according to the image resolution
and the average size of the vehicles. Note that the presence of a
vehicle in an image can activate several foveal classifiers (high
positive score values in the corresponding score map), such as
shown in Fig. 2, where the active foveal classifiers are marked
in magenta and the inactive ones in green. This situation
is managed by the third and last stage, Vehicle location
determination, which uses the score values of the classifiers
to accurately determine all the vehicle locations (blue points
in Fig. 2). To that end, a non-maxima suppression process
with the following steps is performed. First, it loops through
all the active classifiers and, for each of them, the scores of
all the active classifiers in its neighborhood (the seven closest
classifiers) are summed up. If the result is not high enough,
they are deactivated and set to zero. Later on, a grayscale
morphological dilation is performed using the same neighbor-
hood expressed before. To end the non-maxima suppression
process, the original map is subtracted from the dilated map
obtained in the previous step. As a result, only maxima have
positive values. Also, there will be as many vehicle detections
as maxima. The final location of the vehicles is obtained by
bilinear interpolation of the locations of the active classifiers
belonging to the neighborhood of a maximum value, weighted
by their scores. Fig. 4 shows an example where magenta points
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Fig. 2. Block diagram of the proposed solution.

classifier is potentially different, despite the fact that they all

Fig. 3. Hexagonal grid pattern representing the set of reference points of
the foveal classifiers.
represent classifiers with positive scores (in green numbers)
and blue points represent the final estimations of each vehicle
point-based location. Note that the output of every foveal
share the same input GHOG. This is the result of the cus-
tomized (but automatic) training framework, illustrated in the
right part of Fig. 2 and described in the following subsection.
2) Training System: The training phase can be divided
into three stages: 1) Computation of global image descriptor,
2) Positive and negative sample association, and 3) Training
of the grid of classifiers. The first stage is the same as the one
described in the prediction stage. It computes a unique GHOG
vector per image in the training database. The second stage
adaptively associates the GHOG of an image in the training
database with a positive or negative label (indicating either the
presence or not of a vehicle) for every foveal classifier. As a
hexagonal grid is used, a positive label is assigned to the seven
foveal classifiers whose reference points are closest to the
point-based annotation. A negative label is assigned to the rest
of the classifiers in the grid. As above-mentioned, the GHOG
vector for each image can be at the same time a positive sample

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BELL et al.: NOVEL SYSTEM FOR NVD BASED ON FOVEAL CLASSIFIERS WITH REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
Fig. 4. Illustration of the prediction process. In magenta, active classifiers belonging to a neighborhood of a local maximum score value (values in green),
and, in blue, final vehicle locations.
Fig. 5. Example of the dynamic label association for a GHOG vector and
the grid of foveal classifiers in the presence of a vehicle.
for a foveal classifier and a negative one for another. The result
is a map of positive and negative labels that indicate for every
classifier if the only GHOG descriptor should be considered
as a positive or negative training sample. This association is
illustrated in Fig. 5, where the vehicle ground-truth location
is represented by the blue triangle, the reference points of
the foveal classifiers that are closer to the ground-truth point
are marked using black crosses, the distance between the
reference points and the ground-truth point is marked with
a light blue line, and the reference points of the rest of foveal
classifiers are marked with green points. Obviously, the total
number of positive and negative samples varies from classifier
to classifier. This fact can provoke that there can be classifiers
with very few or no positive samples at all, because their
reference points are far from any vehicle annotation in the
considered database. Many times, this is due to the absence
of vehicles in some image regions, very likely because they
show pieces of land or other elements where vehicles do
not pass (e.g. outside roads, countryside, shoulders, walls or
median strip). This situation is settled by finally training only
those foveal SVM classifiers with enough positive samples.
Fig. 6 shows an example of trained and non-trained classifiers,
using green crosses and red points, respectively. As a result,
the output of this stage consists of a set of trained models for
the grid of foveal SVM classifiers, which will be used in the
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5
Fig. 6. Example of distribution of trained and non-trained classifiers.
Non-trained classifiers are represented using red points, and trained classifiers
using green crosses.
prediction stage. Regarding the third stage, Training of grid of
classifiers, the SVM classifiers are trained using a grid search
strategy, where several values of regularization are evaluated
per classifier [35].
Note that every foveal classifier has all the image informa-
tion available through the GHOG descriptor, instead of just
a limited image area. However, each of them will focus on
specific components of this descriptor to detect vehicles close
to their corresponding reference points. More specifically,
the training procedure via the dynamic sample association
induces for every foveal classifier the following twofold behav-
ior: 1) to filter out the components of the GHOG descriptor that
are useless to detect vehicles around an image region vaguely
defined by the classifier reference point, and 2) to check if the
descriptor components of interest present a pattern that can be
compatible with the presence of a vehicle.
A. Computation of the Global Image Descriptor
The feature extraction stage computes a unique global
descriptor for each image, instead of obtaining a number of
local descriptors (typical from sliding window and region
proposal approaches). Thus, a great reduction in the com-
putational cost is achieved. As mentioned, in the current
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Fig. 7. Block diagram of the global image descriptor GHOG.

Fig. 8. Sample images from the different scenarios of the NVD database. The regions of interest of each scenario are delimited by the green boundaries.

implementation, a variation of HOG is used to obtain a global
descriptor per image, called Global HOG (GHOG). It is
computed in four steps (see Fig. 7). First, a multiresolution
pyramid strategy over the image is carried out, where the
biggest scale corresponds to the original image, and the others
are subsampled versions. This strategy makes the system
invariant to the size of the vehicles and of their distorted light
beams, which highly depends on the position of the camera
with respect to the road and the camera zoom. The second
step divides every pyramid level into non-overlapping blocks
(instead of overlapping blocks) to speed up the process and
reduce computational and memory costs. The third step com-
putes the HOG descriptor for every block. Finally, in the
fourth step, all the HOG descriptors (from all the pyramids
levels and corresponding blocks) are concatenated to form
the GHOG descriptor that represents the whole image. Note
that the resulting GHOG descriptor preserves, to some degree,
the spatial information of the original image, since there is
a direct correspondence between every image block and the
subset of consecutive components in GHOG containing the
HOG vector representation of such block.
III. NVD DATABASE
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no database
large enough for vehicle detection in nighttime. Therefore,
a new database, called Nighttime Vehicle Detection (NVD)
database, has been created and made publicly available [36].
It is composed of sequences from five different highways. The
acquisition was performed using static cameras belonging to
actual traffic camera networks. These cameras provide low
quality imagery (highly compressed and with limited frame
rate), which boosts the complexity of the vehicle detection
task. A sample image from every scenario is shown in Fig. 8.
As can be observed, vehicles are not easily distinguished, and
their lights usually produce flashes and complex illumination
patterns.
The ground-truth information was generated by manually
selecting and annotating a point for each vehicle depending on

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BELL et al.: NOVEL SYSTEM FOR NVD BASED ON FOVEAL CLASSIFIERS WITH REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
TABLE I
S UMMARY OF THE M AIN C HARACTERISTICS OF THE D IFFERENT S EQUENCES OF THE NVD D ATABASE
its appearance in the image. When the vehicle is represented
as a host of heavily distorted lights (which is the usual case,
as stated in the introduction), that point is approximately
situated between the two front or rear lights. And when
the vehicle’s shape can be better distinguished (for example,
in the case of the closest vehicles to the camera in the
Richmond scenario, illustrated in Fig. 8), the centroid of
the vehicle is approximately selected. The reason to that
divergence is that the selected point was considered to be
the most representative one in the underlying circumstances.
In any case, estimating such representative point for each
vehicle is quite difficult and somewhat subjective in many
situations. Nevertheless, the main goal of this process is to
produce consistent annotations along time, so as to reliably
follow the vehicle’s trajectory.
In Fig. 8, each blue triangle placed over a vehicle represents
the corresponding ground-truth. Additionally, ground-truth is
restricted to the regions of interest (ROIs) delimited by the
boundaries in green. Thus, outside the boundaries, there are
no ground-truth annotations, because either the size of vehicles
is too small to allow the annotation by a human operator, or no
vehicles are expected in those regions (e.g. outside roads).
A summary of the main characteristics of the sequences of
each scenario of the NVD database is presented in Table I. The
differences among them allow vehicle detection algorithms
to be trained and tested in a wide range of situations. For
example, the image resolution makes considerable changes in
the size of vehicles measured in number of pixels. In addition,
the frame rate determines the perceived movement of vehicles,
and so the number of samples obtained of each one.
IV. R ESULTS
The developed algorithm has been tested with the NVD
database using different image descriptors (including pre-
trained neural networks such as ResNet [37] and VGG16 [38])
and classifiers, leading to different implementations. Addition-
ally, it has been compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms
Faster R-CNN [39] and YOLOv3 [40].
The following metrics have been utilized to measure the
performance of each algorithm in terms of classification
accuracy and computational cost: precision (P), recall (R),
F1-Score (F), average processing time per image t¯, and the
mean (μ D ) and standard deviation (σ D ) of the error distance
in pixels (D). The precision is the percentage of correct
detections, i.e. the percentage of vehicles correctly detected
(true positives) with respect to all the detected vehicles (true
positives and false positives), expressed as follows:
True Positives
P= (1)
True Positives + False Positives
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7
The recall is the percentage of correct detections (true pos-
itives) with respect to the total number of existing vehicles
(true positives and false negatives), expressed by:
True Positives
R= (2)
True Positives + False Negatives
The F1-Score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall,
given by:
P·R
F =2· (3)
P+R
Finally, the error distance D determines the localization error
in pixels for the positives. It is defined as the Euclidean dis-
tance in pixels between the point-based ground-truth position
of a vehicle and the predicted position:

D = (x gt − x d̂ )2 + (ygt − yd̂ )2 (4)
where x gt and ygt are the pixel coordinates of the vehicle
position according to the ground-truth information, and x d̂ and
yd̂ represent the pixel coordinates of the corresponding true
positive detection, d̂, which is the one that satisfies D ≤ Td ,
where Td is a distance threshold.
A. Analysis of the Primary Implementation
First, a study to evaluate the performance in terms of accu-
racy and operation time of the primary variant is presented,
that is, the original implementation with the GHOG+SVM
composition. To that end, the configuration of the global
descriptor and the grid of classifiers are initially introduced.
Later on, the influence of the grid resolution on the overall
performance of the system is studied. Lastly, some insights
about the performance of the system in the presence of a high
amount of vehicles are given.
1) Configuration of the Descriptor and the Grid of Clas-
sifiers: The parameter values of the HOG descriptors have
been set as follows: window size of 16 × 16 pixels, block
normalization of Nbl = 16 × 16 pixels, cells of Nc = 4 × 4
pixels, and Nbi = 9 bins per cell histogram, which are a
reasonable trade-off between computational cost and classi-
fication performance. Regarding the multiresolution pyramid,
two scaled versions have been used: half and one-quarter
resolutions.
A linear kernel has been used for all the SVMs, along with
an individually tuned regularization parameter. In addition,
with the aim of using equivalently dense grids of classifiers in
all the scenarios, the grid resolution has been set in such a way
that each classifier ‘controls’ a similar portion of the image,
regardless of the sequence, and that the number of pixels
assigned to each classifier is approximately the same in both
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF R ESULTS W ITH D IFFERENT G RID R ESOLUTIONS U SING THE P ROPOSED F RAMEWORK
W ITH GHOG D ESCRIPTORS AND SVM C LASSIFIERS

dimensions. Thus, the grid resolution has been determined
considering the image resolution (width, W, and height, H )
and the percentage of pixels assigned to each classifier in
the smaller dimension, denoted as p p . So, given that H is
lower than W, the number of rows in the grid of classifiers
is computed as 100/ p p  and the number of columns as
(W/H ) × 100/ p p . Furthermore, the scenario determines
the number of finally trained classifiers, which depends on
the portion of the image where the ground-truth is annotated,
which is different for each scenario.
Finally, Td (the distance threshold to consider a detection
as true positive) has been set to be proportional to the image
size: 8% of the image height, as it has been found to be a
reasonable trade-off between accuracy and applicability in all
scenarios.
2) Performance: Table II reveals the impact of the grid
resolution on the performance of the proposed foveal system
using GHOG descriptors and SVM classifiers in the five
scenarios included in the database. The results show that,
if too few classifiers are used, the system yields mediocre
results, as vehicles moving close together might be detected
as just one. This is particularly pronounced in the furthest
sections of the road, since vehicles appear smaller and closer
to each other due to the camera perspective. The performance
improves as denser grids are used, at the cost of increasing
the number of classifiers to be trained, and also the prediction
time (see t¯). Regarding the error distance D, it tends to
decrease (as shown by the μ D and σ D values) with the grid
resolution size, as expected. This also implies that vehicles that
are relatively close to each other can be better distinguished
with a denser grid resolution (providing that classifiers remain
properly trained with enough positive samples). In this case,
an increase in the recall (R) can be perceived. Nevertheless,
using too many classifiers can lead to an increase of false
positives, also resulting in a poor performance. In this last
case, however, it might be more damaging the fact that some
of the classifiers of the grid can be badly trained, due to a lack
of samples in the areas assigned to them. This can result in a
drop in the recall.
Therefore, as a general rule of thumb, the system is able to
detect very close vehicles, provided that a grid of classifiers
dense enough is used, and the database has a sufficient number
of samples to properly train every classifier. It is then key to
select a resolution of the grid of classifiers that is in line with
the expected change in size of the vehicles in the image, which,
in turn, as said, depends on the resolution of the image.
Fig. 9 illustrates the performance of the proposed system
in crowded scenarios of the NVD database. As a reference,
a grid resolution of 50 × 89 classifiers was used for the
examples. It can be seen that the system produces good results,
although it was been specifically oriented to deal with crowded
scenarios (these situations are special cases usually addressed
by explicitly dedicated approaches in the object detection
literature). Fig. 9 also shows that lights from the very end
of the road are not classified as vehicles, because those areas
were not included in the human-based annotation process.
Although this is not strictly a limitation of the developed
algorithm, if ground-truth annotations were available in these
areas, the classification performance could probably decrease
there.
With respect to the computational cost of the prediction
phase presented in Table II, this has been obtained by using
a single-thread-based implementation, executed on an Intel
Core i9-7900X @ 3.30 GHz, and therefore improvements are

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BELL et al.: NOVEL SYSTEM FOR NVD BASED ON FOVEAL CLASSIFIERS WITH REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
Fig. 9. Examples of nighttime vehicle detection under dense traffic situations,
where the final point-based detections are marked as blue dots.
expected if a multi-thread implementation was used instead,
as several classifiers could be evaluated in parallel on different
threads and cores. Computational cost values are shown for
several parameter configurations: image resolution (different
for each scenario) and grid resolution. As expected, the greater
the image and grid resolutions, the greater the processing
time is, although all the values are compatible with real-time
requirements.
B. Comparison With Alternative Implementations and
State-of-the-Art Algorithms
In this second part of the experiments, the performance of
the primary implementation has been compared with other
alternatives, but still using the same framework, where the
original GHOG and SVM algorithms have been replaced
with other methods. Also, the comparison includes the
state-of-the-art works Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3. First,
the configuration of the alternative descriptors and classi-
fiers is introduced. Next, the configuration of the competing
algorithms and the necessary adaptations that were carried
out to enable a proper comparison are described. Finally,
an overall performance comparison including the primary,
and the alternative implementations and the state-of-the-art
algorithms is presented.
1) Description and Configuration of the Alternative
Descriptors and Classifiers: The following four descriptors
have been implemented as alternatives to GHOG: Global Haar
(GHaar), Global LBP (GLBP), VGG16, and ResNet. The
descriptors GHaar and GLBP use the local image descriptors
Haar and LBP, respectively, to compute a feature vector per
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9
image block, according to the considered image division.
Similarly to GHOG, the global image descriptors have been
created by concatenating all the obtained local feature vectors
(see Section II-A). The parameters that have led to the best
experiment results are listed next. For Haar: window size of
72 × 96 pixels, stride step of 64 pixels in both horizontal
and vertical, and compression of windows to the resolution
of 24 × 32 pixels have been selected considering the memory
limitations to train the classifiers. In the case of LBP: window
size of 32 × 32 pixels and neighborhoods of 3 × 3 pixels have
been selected. Lastly, for the VGG16-based and ResNet-based
descriptors, pretrained ImageNet challenge [41] weights have
been used to extract a global image descriptor directly from
the layer ‘block5 pool’ (18th layer) of the VGG16 back-
bone [38] and from the previous layer to the final block of
dense layers of the ResNet backbone [37]. This process has
implied to re-scale all images to 224 × 224 pixels. These
pretrained backbones were chosen for two main reasons.
First, they both are oriented to boost the recognition per-
formance, achieving state-of-the-art results in many different
applications. In addition, they can work in real-time using
the appropriate (high-performance) hardware. Second, these
backbones are frequently used in the literature as benchmarks
for the evaluation of the performance of new systems or frame-
works. As a consequence, other neural network architectures
more oriented to real-time applications using hardware with
restricted computational capabilities, such as MobileNet [42],
were discarded, since they are less complex, and hence,
worse results are expected in general (independently of the
application).
Additionally, NNs have been implemented as an alternative
to SVMs. These NNs are composed of three fully connected
(or dense) layers: the first one with 128 elements, the second
one with 64 elements, and the final one with 2 elements. After
every fully connected layer, a rectifier linear unit (ReLU) is
used as activation function, followed by a dropout layer with
a factor of 50% for the two first fully connected layers. The
last layer is a sigmoid.
Finally, all the considered variations of the primary system
have been implemented to be executed on a single-thread
CPU (hence, no specialized hardware is used). In addition,
the variation consisting in pretrained VGG16 and ResNet
features with NN classifiers has been implemented on a
GPU, too.
2) Adaptation and Configuration of the State-of-the-Art
Algorithms: Before presenting the parameters selected for
Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3, some considerations must be
taken into account. Most of the vehicle detection techniques
(and, more in general, object detection ones) require bounding-
box-based annotations for the training, instead of points. This
is the case of Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3. Therefore, an adap-
tation was required to enable them to work with point-based
annotations (instead of bounding boxes), as the ones provided
by the proposed NVD database, and also to make them deliver
point-based predictions to unify the metrics criteria for eval-
uation. For the training part, bounding boxes of several sizes
(width and height) are generated around every ground-truth
point-based location, and then fed to the algorithms. Hence,
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10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

TABLE III
C OMPARISON OF THE D ETECTION P ERFORMANCE A MONG T HREE VARIATIONS OF THE P ROPOSED S YSTEM ,
FASTER R-CNN, AND YOLOV 3 FOR E ACH S CENARIO

the previous algorithms can be properly trained with the
required bounding box annotations. Depending on their size,
the bounding boxes encompass larger or smaller vehicle and
background regions, affecting detection performance. The one
that offers better results is finally selected. With respect to the
predictions, the bounding boxes delivered by Faster R-CNN
and YOLOv3 are transformed into point-based detections by
just computing their centroids.
Considering the parameters of the adapted Faster R-CNN,
different sets of anchor scales for the Region Proposal
Network (RPN) and thresholds of the non-maxima suppres-
sion (NMS) for filtering RPN proposals have been tested (see
Table III). The number of ROIs has been set to 2000 in
training, and 1000 for prediction. For the YOLOv3 algorithm,
different configurations of parameters have been used for the
anchor scales and the score threshold. To improve the training
convergence and the quality of the finally trained models,
pretrained weights from the ImageNet challenge [41] have
been used to initialize both algorithms, instead of random ones.
The use of pretrained models also implies resizing the images

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BELL et al.: NOVEL SYSTEM FOR NVD BASED ON FOVEAL CLASSIFIERS WITH REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
to 640 × 640 and 416 × 416, for Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3,
respectively. This image resizing is also mandatory due to the
memory limitations of the GPU devices for training. Finally,
the prediction stage of the algorithms has been tested under
two different configurations: 1) using exclusively a CPU and
2) using high-end GPU (Nvidia Titan Xp). In the case of CPU,
a multi-threading implementation has been used, since it is
natively supported by the deep learning library used for the
implementation.
3) Performance Comparison: Table III presents a detection
performance comparison, using the NVD database, among
Faster R-CNN, YOLOv3, and the three best variants within
the proposed framework: GHOG+SVM, VGG16+SVM, and
VGG16+NN. It is important mentioning that the detection
performance of the alternatives based on the GHaar and GLBP
have been significantly worse than the rest, and thus they
have not been included in the table. Specifically, the best
F1-Score that results from using GHaar is 0.402, obtained
in the Walnut sequences, and the best one using GLBP is
0.366, obtained for the California scenario. These very poor
results are attributed to different reasons. In the case of
GHaar, results were due to the significantly lower robustness
to illumination changes and image noise of this descriptor in
comparison with GHOG, which are very common in the NVD
database scenarios. Concerning GLBP, results respond to the
fact that LBP was originally conceived for texture recognition,
and not exactly for object recognition with a global struc-
ture. Similarly, ResNet+SVM, and ResNet+NN were finally
not included in the table since their F1-Score figures were
clearly lower (around 10%) than the ones obtained using the
VGG16 network.
As can be observed in the table, the two best results
in terms of detection performance have been obtained by
two different implementations of the proposed framework,
GHOG+SVM and VGG16+NN, according to the mean values
of the F1-Score. It is also noticeable that these two vari-
ants, along with VGG16+SVM, are much faster than Faster
R-CNN and YOLOv3 using a CPU. Even more, the variation
GHOG+SVM using a single-thread CPU is faster than R-CNN
and YOLOv3 using GPU. This encourages the deployment of
the proposed system in a network of traffic cameras, where
the cost of the processing hardware is a factor of paramount
relevance.
Regarding the accuracy of the detections, Faster R-CNN
and YOLOv3 achieve the best results according to the error
distance metrics μ D and σ D . Nonetheless, GHOG+SVM
performs very closely to them. The main explanation for this
fact is that Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3 have been pretrained
with the external ImageNet database, which alleviates the
fact that the size of the NVD database is relatively small
in comparison with other databases used by deep learning
techniques. In this sense, a larger nighttime vehicle database
could significantly improve the different implementations of
the proposed framework (which are trained solely based on the
NVD database), since reliable denser grids would be possible
(there would be more samples to properly train a higher
number of classifiers), leading in turn to a better localization
accuracy.
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11
Finally, the primary variant (GHOG+SVM) achieves the
best overall performance considering both detection accuracy
and operation time, closely followed by the VGG16+NN
variant. Moreover, this is accomplished using just a standard
CPU. Also, its localization accuracy is very close to the best
results achieved by YOLOv3. Lastly, better results in detection
and localization accuracy are expected using larger databases,
since no pretrained models have been used, unlike with Faster
R-CNN and YOLOv3.
V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
Visual vehicle surveillance is an important task for traffic
applications and it becomes critical in the nighttime, when
the probability of an accident peaks. In this work, a real-time
vehicle detection algorithm for nighttime situations has been
presented to face this challenging task, where images basically
include flashes that occupy large image regions, which can
even be disconnected from the light focuses, and the actual
shape of vehicles is not well defined. By using a global
image descriptor along with a grid of foveal classifiers, vehicle
positions are accurately and efficiently estimated. Every clas-
sifier shares the same global image descriptor (unlike most
methods, which use the traditional sliding window approach),
but it is trained to detect vehicles in specific image regions
by mainly analyzing the complex light patterns. Additionally,
only point-based annotations are required to train the system,
speeding up the costly task of creating databases. The output
of the proposed system could be used for specific applications
such as traffic congestion problems or collisions avoidance.
Finally, a new nighttime database with point-based annotations
has been created and made publicly available to assess the
effectiveness of the proposed method and allow for comparison
under realistic conditions.
Additionally, even though the proposed system is focused
on nighttime situations, the convenience of upgrading it to
also work in daytime scenarios is highly considered, so as
to have a complete solution. In this sense, albeit not tested in
these situations, the system could have the potential to be used
in daytime scenarios with minor modifications by training it
using suitable databases. Hence, this extension is proposed as
future work.
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Andrés Bell received the B.Eng. degree in telecom-
munication technologies and services and the mas-
ter’s degree in telecommunication engineering from
the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM),
Madrid, Spain, in 2015 and 2017, respectively,
where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree.
Since 2014, he has been a member of the Grupo de
Tratamiento de Imágenes (Image Processing Group),
UPM, where he has been actively involved in Span-
ish and European projects. His research interests
include in the area of computer vision, machine
learning, and video and image analysis and processing.
Tomás Mantecón received the joint B.Sc. and
M.S. degree telecommunication engineering and
the Ph.D. degree in telecommunication engineering
from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM),
Madrid, Spain, in 2012 and 2018, respectively. Since
2013, he has been a member of the Grupo de
Tratamiento de Imágenes (Image Processing Group),
UPM, where he has been actively involved in Span-
ish and European projects. His research interests
include in the area of image processing, computer
vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
BELL et al.: NOVEL SYSTEM FOR NVD BASED ON FOVEAL CLASSIFIERS WITH REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE
César Díaz received the joint B.Sc. and M.S. degree
in telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D.
degree in telecommunication engineering from the
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid,
Spain, in 2007 and 2017, respectively. Since 2008,
he has been a member of the Grupo de Tratamiento
de Imágenes (Image Processing Group), UPM,
where he has been actively involved in Spanish
and European projects. His research interests include
in the area of multimedia delivery and immersive
communications.
Carlos R. del-Blanco received the degree in
telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree
in telecommunication from the Universidad Politéc-
nica de Madrid (UPM), in 2005 and 2011, respec-
tively. Since 2005, he has been a member of
the Image Processing Group, UPM. Since 2011,
he has also been a member of the Faculty of the
E. T. S. Ingenieros de Telecomunicación, as an
Assistant Professor of signal theory and communica-
tions with the Department of Signals, Systems, and
Communications. His professional interests include
signal and image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, and
machine learning, and stochastic dynamic models.
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13
Fernando Jaureguizar received the degree in
telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree
in telecommunication from the Universidad Politéc-
nica de Madrid (UPM), in 1987 and 1994, respec-
tively. Since 1987, he has been a member of the
Image Processing Group, UPM. Since 1991, he has
been a member of the faculty of UPM, and since
1995, he has been an Associate Professor of signal
theory and communications. His professional inter-
ests include digital image processing, video coding,
3-DTV, computer vision, and design and develop-
ment of multimedia communications systems. He has been actively involved in
European Projects (Eureka, ACTS, ITEA, and EIT-RM) and national projects
in Spain.
Narciso García (Member, IEEE) received the
degree in ingeniero de telecomunicación (five years
engineering program) and the Ph.D. degree in
ingeniero de telecomunicación (in communications)
from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM),
Madrid, Spain, in 1976 and 1983, respectively. Since
1977, he has been a member of the faculty of UPM,
where he is currently a Professor of Signal Theory
and Communications. He also leads the Grupo de
Tratamiento de Imágenes (Image Processing Group),
UPM. He has been actively involved in Spanish
and European research projects, also serving as an Evaluator, a Reviewer,
an Auditor, and an Observer of several research and development programs
of the European Union. He was a Co-Writer of the EBU proposal, base of
the ITU standard for digital transmission of TV at 34–45 Mb/s (ITU-T J.81).
He was an Area Coordinator of the Spanish Evaluation Agency (ANEP) from
1990 to 1992. He was the General Coordinator of the Spanish Commission for
the Evaluation of the Research Activity (CNEAI) from 2011 to 2014. He has
been the Vice-Rector of International Relations, UPM, from 2014 to 2016.
His current research interests include digital video compression, computer
vision, and quality of experience. He was a recipient of the Junior and Senior
Research awards of UPM, in 1987 and 1994, respectively. He received the
Spanish National Graduation Award and the Ph.D. Graduation Award.