Journal of Computer Applications (JCA)
ISSN: 0974-1925, Volume V, Issue 3, 2012
Vision-Based Vehicle Speed
Measurement System
Prakash.V a,*, Devi.P b,1
Abstract - Vision-based vehicle speed measurement
(VSM) is one of the most convenient methods available in
intelligent transportation systems. A new algorithm for
estimating individual vehicle speed based on two
consecutive images captured from a traffic safety camera
system. Its principles are first, both images are
transformed from the image plane to the 3D world
coordinates based on the calibrated camera parameters.
Second, the difference of the two transformed images is
calculated, resulting in the background being eliminated
and vehicles in the two images are mapped onto one
image. Finally, a block feature of the vehicle closest to the
ground is matched to estimate vehicle travel distance and
speed.
Index Terms – images, vehicle, vehicle speed measurement.
I. INTRODUCTION
Intelligent transportation systems are becoming more
important due to their advantages of saving lives, money, and
time. Acquiring traffic information, such as lane width traffic
volume (the number of travelling vehicles per time period
through a position in a lane), traffic density (the number of
total vehicles in a given area at a given time) and vehicle
speed, these are the key part of intelligent transportation
systems, and such information is used to manage and control
traffic. It focuses on vehicle speed since reducing speed can
help to reduce accidents.
Intelligent transportation systems is a new approach to
estimate vehicle speed using video sequence data recorded
form roadway surveillance cameras under occlusion. Rather
than detecting or tracking individual vehicles in each image
frame as is conventionally done, It transform the sequence of
frames into a graphical representation of vehicle trajectories
using time stacks. Where a time stack is constructed from a
video sequence out of temporally successive slices of the
same 1D region in the frame. Most vision based traffic
monitoring systems (VBTMS) attempt to detect and track
discrete vehicles. But such segmentation and tracking is
hampered by occlusion, changes in lightning conditions and
shadows. Many Solutions have been developed, Segmenting
discrete vehicles for detection and tracking in video is
difficult, measuring the speed of vehicle features is much
simpler and so this work seeks to bypass the need for
segmenting each vehicle when measuring traffic speed over
Manuscript received 8/Sept/2012.
Manuscript selected 11/Sept/2012.
Prakash.V ,Sri Ramakrishna Institute of Technology , Coimbatore, India
E-mail: venkatprakash01@gmail.com
Devi.P, Assistant Professor, Dept of ECE, Sri Ramakrishna Institute of
Technology , Coimbatore, India, E-mail: devisatmp@gmail.com
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time and space. Proposed system consists of 5 steps to
estimate mean speeds:
(1) Camera calibration from image to world co ordinate
transformation to generate velocity fields,
(2) Video stabilization to decrease unwanted camera
motion in the video sequence,
(3) Pre-processing using edge removal apply image
enhancement for background estimation and shadow
removal,
(4) Background estimation and shadow removal,
(5) Cubic spline interpolation for trajectory
approximation.
The overall intention is to implement a vision-based speed
sensor considering occlusion caused by overlapping vehicles.
It is handling the occluders rather than the occluded vehicles.
For almost two decades these CCTV systems were strictly
used to extend the view available to human traffic managers.
The objective behind these video-based traffic surveillance
systems is to extract important traffic parameters for traffic
analysis and management such as vehicle speed, vehicle path,
flow rate and density. Vision-based vehicle detection is
intended to be a lower cost alternative to many other detector
technologies, e.g., loop detectors. Loop detectors are
essentially metal detectors embedded in the pavement, and
have been the most common detector to record traffic
parameters. Depending on deployment these detectors can
collect information such as vehicle length, speed and flow
rate. However, loop detectors only detect vehicles directly
overhead. In contrast, vision-based systems collect
information over an extended space compared to the
conventional vehicle detection systems.
II. BRIEF REVIEW OF VISION – BASED VEHICLE SPEED
MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS
The block diagram of the proposed algorithm is depicted in
Fig. 1. To begin with, the two consecutive images taken
through a perspective view are transformed from their 2D
image plane to 3D world coordinates using camera
parameters calculated from lane-marking calibration. As there
is no height information immediately available from the two
images, only the X-Y plane in 3D is considered for all
subsequent estimation. From the two reconstructed images, an
image differencing is applied so that the two vehicles are
overlaid on one resultant image. Although this can effectively
remove the background features as the time difference
between the two images is small, it also resulted in a large
amount of noise and holes along the boundaries of the
vehicles. These are removed by a carefully selected threshold
and morphological operations to obtain a combined vehicle
mask. After that, a block matching algorithm is applied, which
includes specifying the block and matching it within a search
window. As the 3D X-Y plane is given in physical dimension
(meters in this case), he distance between the two matched
 Vision-Based Vehicle Speed Measurement System

blocks denotes the distance traveled by the vehicle between Let Q= (XQ, YQ, ZQ) be an arbitrary point in the 3-D world
the two consecutive images. Speed is then estimated by taking coordinate and q=(xq,yq) be the corresponding 2-D image
this value and dividing it by the time taken between the two coordinates of Q. A forward mapping function,
images.

Figure 3. Image Reconstruction

Figure 1. Diagram of the Proposed Algorithm Which defines the transformation from a point in the world
coordinates to a point in the image coordinates is given as,
Camera Calibration
The purpose of camera calibration is to establish a
relationship between the 3-D world coordinates and the
corresponding 2-D image coordinates.

Position of Camera

Figure 2. Position of Camera

It adopts the camera model proposed in which is depicted in

Fig. 2. In essence, this model describes all the extrinsic
parameters (camera installation height, installation angle,
image plane and swing angle) and an intrinsic parameter
(focal length). Equations define the transformation between the world and
image coordinates.
Image Reconstruction
The definitions of these parameters are: P an angle is the
horizontal angle from the Y axis of the world coordinate
system to the projection of the optical axis of the camera on
the X-Y plane measured in the anti-clockwise direction. Tilt
angle is the vertical angle of the optical axis of the camera
with respect to the X-Y plane of the world coordinate system.
Swing angle is the rotational angle of the camera along its Figure 4. Two consecutive images
optical axis. Focal length is the distance from the image plane Lane markings that form a parallelogram can be used to
to the centre of the camera lens along the optical axis of the estimate the camera parameters, from which Equations can be
camera, while camera height is the perpendicular distance solved. In other words, every pixel of the two consecutive
from the centre of the camera lens to the X-Y plane. images can be transformed to the 3D coordinates (with Z=0)
These parameters can be estimated using existing road lane using Equations , and the corresponding images in X-Y plane
markings without having to measure them physically. Without can be reconstructed, the view along the Z-axis perpendicular
detailed derivation, the mapping between the image plane and to the road plane, the distance traversed by the vehicle
world plane is quoted below. represents the actual distance travelled. However, it should be

83

noted that this is only true for points on the road plane. Other
points that are not on the road plane do not represent the same
as height information is not available. Therefore, the problem
in matching is not finding the most correlated blocks between
the two vehicle images as, but to make sure that the feature
points in the block are on the road surface as well. The most
reliable points in these images for the purpose are the points
where the wheels touch the ground. Unfortunately, these
points are extremely difficult to be determined. For the reason
the subsequent estimation is based on the shadow of the back
bumper that casts on the ground. Although this feature is
relatively easy to find, this is also represents a source of error
due to road colour change, illumination change and shadow.
Background Componsation and Vehicle Detection
Separating the vehicle from the road (background) is a major
issue in detecting a vehicle from a captured image. The
background image is an image that contains no moving
objects. As the road’s scene changes every second, it is
impossible to get a consistent background image from a single
image and create the empty background image with a series of
images containing the moving objects to create an empty
background image from a few captured images.
This algorithm uses the Gaussian mean and the standard
deviation between pixels from each image to ignore the
absurd value pixels that represent the moving object.
Background subtraction computes the inter frame difference
(IFD) between the background image and the incoming image
from the camera. The result of the IFD process, i.e., the
foreground image, involves a black background with floating
vehicles. Image difference is a widely used method for the
detection of motion changes. The interframe difference (IFD)
is calculated by performing a pixel-by-pixel subtraction
between two images.. In particular, after creating the
background, displacements can be seen between the incoming
frames and the generated background.
Moving Region Extraction
If a background reference image is available, it can easily
extract the vehicle masks of each image and estimate the
vehicle position directly.
On the premise that no background reference image is
available, it regard one of the two images as a background
reference, then perform conventional vehicle mask extraction
on the other image and finally get an overlaid vehicle mask.
Morphological Process
A simple vehicle mask extraction method was adopted, which
includes three steps: temporal differencing, thresholding and
morphological operations. First, It overlay one image onto the
other by taking an absolute difference between the two
images. This results in the image as depicted in Fig.5(a). For
colour images and obtain the absolute difference in each
colour channel first and then average them to a gray level
image. The image depicted in Fig. 5(a) is then threshold to
produce a binary image as depicted in Fig.5(b). The threshold,
T, is a predefined value to accommodate small pixel intensity
variation. After that, morphological opening is used to clean
up all the isolated points and morphological closing is used to
join the disconnected vehicle components together, resulting
in the extracted vehicle mask as shown in Figures.
84
Journal of Computer Applications (JCA)
ISSN: 0974-1925, Volume V, Issue 3, 2012
(a) (b)
Figure 5. (a) Binary image after thresholding.
(b) Vehicle mask after morphological operations.
In general, the case as depicted in Fig. represents a typical
scenario. By computing the connected components in the
binary image, it has two blobs which represent the masks of
two individual vehicles. From the distance of the bottom edge
of the two blobs, displacement of the vehicle in two
consecutive frames can be roughly estimated, which could be
refined by block matching. However, for vehicles that are
travelling at low speed, or have long length or the two
consecutive images are taken at a shorter time.
Block Matching
In this Section, the block matching algorithm (BMA)
estimates motion between two images or two video frames
using "blocks" of pixels. First, a source block is defined in
terms of a horizontal base line, a fixed height and a variable
width according to the size of the mask. The blob shown in
Fig.6 is part of the lower blob from the masking image, in
which a horizontal base line is drawn across the lowest part of
the blob. From the base line, an upper boundary of k pixel
above the line and a lower boundary also of k pixels below the
line are defined. As the upper boundary line intersects the
vehicle mask, the left and right boundaries are defined by the
width of the mask intersected by the upper boundary line. This
defines a source block of 2k×w in size.
Figure 6. Definition of Source Block.
With these boundaries, it has a block defined in the first
reconstructed image as the source block. The search is
performed in the second reconstructed image. The mean
absolute difference (MAD) measurement between the source
block and candidate blocks is employed as a criterion in
proposed matching algorithm and roughly estimated
displacement of the vehicle. The underlying supposition
behind motion estimation is that the patterns corresponding to
objects and background in a frame of video sequence move
within the frame to form corresponding objects on the
subsequent frame. The idea behind block matching is to
divide the current frame into a matrix of ‘macro blocks’ that
 Vision-Based Vehicle Speed Measurement System
are then compared with corresponding block and its adjacent
neighbours in the previous frame to create a vector that
stipulates the movement of a macro block from one location
to another in the previous frame. This movement calculated
for all the macro blocks comprising a frame, constitutes the
motion estimated in the current frame. The search area for a
good macro block match is constrained up to p pixels on all
fours sides of the corresponding macro block in previous
frame.
Figure 7. Travel Distance Estimation
Velocity Measurement
Once a block is matched, travelled distance in pixels, PD, of
the vehicle between the two images is represented by the
distance between the source block and the matched block.
Vehicle speed is the distance travelled normalized to physical
distance in m, and divided by the time taken to traverse that
distance, which is given by,
Where, PD - Travelled distance in pixels,
R - Resolution of reconstructed images,
t - Time interval between the two images,
v - Estimated speed
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Figure 8. Speed of the vehicles
In this experiment, we evaluate the accuracy of the proposed
method in estimating individual vehicle speed from real
traffic images at day-time as well as night-time, by comparing
the estimated value with the speed measured by a Doppler
speed radar system. All the test images are taken by a
surveillance camera at 0.5 seconds apart, with the size of
1280×1024 and 24 bit color depth mode. We first calculate
the reconstructed images as described in Section 2.2 with
resolution of 10 pixels/meter, and then threshold the 256 gray
level frame difference using a threshold of 30 to generate the
vehicle mask. k, sxand syin block matching period were set to
10 pixels, 20 pixels and 10 pixels respectively. For the 31 sets
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of day-time images, the results estimated by the proposed
method and reference speed.
IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTION
In conclusion, a novel method for estimating individual
vehicle speed using two consecutive images from a traffic
surveillance camera has been proposed. Compared with speed
from radar, the averaged estimation errors for day-time cases
is 3.27%, while for night-time cases is 8.51%. Future work
will be focused on the block matching accuracy and the
robustness of the algorithm against large changes in ambient
illumination conditions.
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BIOGRAPHY
V. Prakash received the BE degree in Electronics and
Communication Engineering from Sri Ramakrishna
Institute of Technology, Anna University Coimbatore
in 2012. He is an active member of IETE. He had
presented national conferences and international
conferences in various fields He had done the project
in the area of Digital Image Processing. His area of
interest is Vehicular technology, Digital Electronics, Digital Image
Processing.
P. Devi received the BE degree in Electronics and
Communication Engineering from VLB Janakiammal
College of Engineering and Technology, Anna University
Chennai in 2009 and the ME degree in Communication
Systems from Sri Krishna College of Engineering and
Technology, Anna University Coimbatore in 2011.
Currently working in Sri Ramakrishna Institute of
Technology as an Assistant Professor in ECE Department.
She has one year teaching experience. She has presented the papers in the
national conference. Under her guidance, the final year students are doing
their project in various fields. Her field of interest is Digital Image
Processing.