A Novel Algorithm for Estimating Vehicle Speed
from Two Consecutive Images
Xiao Chen He and Nelson H. C. Yung
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
{xche, nyung } @eee.hku.hk
Abstract
In this paper, we present 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.
Experimental results show that the proposed method
exhibits good and consistent performance. When
compared with speed measurements obtained from
speed radar, averaged estimation errors are 3.27%
and 8.51% for day-time and night-time test examples
respectively, which are better than other previously
published results. The proposed algorithm can be
easily extended to work on image sequences.
1. Introduction
Vehicle speed is a fundamental traffic variable that
is essential to both macroscopic and microscopic
traffic analysis [1]. The current state-of-the-art in
speed measurement technologies include the use of
magnetic inductive loop detectors, magnetic strips,
Doppler radar, infrared sensors, laser sensors, and etc
[1], [2], [3]. Inductive loop detectors and strips are
considered as intrusive sensors that need to be
installed at a fixed location on the road, whereas
infrared, radar and laser sensors are non-intrusive
sensors that do not need to dig up the road. As many
of these speed measurement technologies also use
digital image sequences to record the event, estimation
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of vehicle speed from the image sequence presents a
natural extension of the existing methods, and also
serves to verify the accuracy of the measurement
technology concerned. As a result, several
image-based vehicle speed estimation techniques have
been proposed in the past. Some of them suggested
estimating speed by placing reference geometrical
shapes either on the road physically or on the screen
image, and then estimating travel times of vehicles
between the referenced shapes either through a
perspective image view or a perpendicular view
normal to the road plane [4], [5], [6]. Some others
make efforts on pixel speed estimation and convert to
ground truth speed by geometrical transformation [7].
Moreover, Dailey & Li [8] proposed an algorithm that
is based on un-calibrated cameras and a known vehicle
length distribution. Obviously, large estimation error
may result when the distribution is not representative.
Cathey & Dailey [9], [10] used a one-parameter
camera calibration model to ‘straighten’ images and to
compute an image to roadway scale factor, from which
a cross-correlation algorithm is applied to the
straightened image to measure travel distance and
estimate average traffic speed. Schoepflin & Dailey
[11], [12] proposed a calibration method based on a
known distance perpendicular to the road and a cross
correlation technique to estimate the mean speed after
tracking a group of vehicles on a lane. Pai et al [13]
proposed an integrated method for mean traffic speed
estimation, in which block matching algorithm is used
to estimate the moving distance of a vehicle between
two consecutive frames. They proposed a fast
searching algorithm called adaptive windowing
prediction, based on determined vehicle speed in
previous frames, for improving real-time system
computational efficiencies.
In summary, our survey reveals that most
vision-based speed estimation methods estimate
average traffic speed over a period of time with error
rate of over 10% compare with the reference value.
Such error rate is considered large for any practical
 Figure 1. Diagram of the proposed algorithm
use. Another limitation is that these methods are
usually based on a sequence of video images: for
updating background reference [14] or computing
forward and backward differences between the frames
for motion tracking [15]. The errors due to day-night
transition or general weather changes could be large
unless updating is frequent enough, which needs to
trade-off with computational complexity. Actually, in
most road safety systems, vehicle speed is monitored
by radar or other non-visual sensors, and then two
high quality consecutive images are captured when
speeding is detected. In these systems, although traffic
video may be available which are of low resolution, an
automatic vehicle speed estimation method from the
two high quality consecutive images is therefore a
logical choice. If speed estimation can be calculated
from two images, then it would be trivial to do the
same from an image sequence. For these reasons, we
propose a new two-images-based vehicle speed
estimation algorithm in this paper, which can be
compared with the speed measured by a Doppler
speed radar system operating at 34.3 GHz for
referencing. Compare with video-based algorithms,
the proposed algorithm is fast, needs less storage, and
is reasonably accurate.
This paper is organized as follows: detailed
approach is presented in Section 2, experiment results
are depicted in Section 3, and conclusion is drawn in
Section 4.
2. Proposed Algorithm
2.1. General principle
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
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coordinates using camera parameters calculated from
lane-marking calibration [16]. 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), the distance between the two matched blocks
denotes the distance traveled by the vehicle between
the two consecutive images. Speed is then estimated
by taking this value and dividing it by the time taken
between the two images.
2.2. 2D to 3D transformation
The purpose of camera calibration is to establish a
relationship between the 3-D world coordinates and
the corresponding 2-D image coordinates. In this
paper, we adopt the camera model proposed in [16]
and [17], which is depicted in Fig. 2. In essence, this
model describes all the extrinsic parameters (camera
height h, pan angle p, tilt angle t and swing angle s)
and an intrinsic parameter (focal length, f). The
definitions of these parameters are: Pan 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
 Z
t
p . Q h
world plane
X
Figure 2. Perspective camera model
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
optical axis. Focal length is the distance from the
image plane to the center of the camera lens along the
optical axis of the camera, while camera height is the
perpendicular distance from the center of the camera
lens to the X-Y plane. These parameters can be
estimated using existing road lane markings without
having to measure them physically [16]. Without
detailed derivation, the mapping between the image
plane and world plane is quoted below.
Let Q=(XQ,YQ,ZQ) be an arbitrary point in the 3-D
world coordinate and q=(xq,yq) be the corresponding
2-D image coordinates of Q. A forward mapping
function, which defines the transformation from a
point in the world coordinates to a point in the image
coordinates is given as,
⎡ X Q (cos p cos s + sin p sin t sin s ) ⎤
⎢ ⎥
f ⎢+ YQ (sin p cos s − cos p sin t sin s )⎥
⎢+ Z cos t sin s ⎥ and
xq = ⎣ Q ⎦ ,
− X Q sin p cos t + YQ cos p cos t + Z Q sin t + h / sin t
⎡ X Q (− cos p sin s + sin p sin t cos s ) ⎤
⎢ ⎥
f ⎢+ YQ (− sin p sin s − cos p sin t cos s )⎥
⎢+ Z cos t cos s ⎥
yq = ⎣ Q ⎦ .
− X Q sin p cos t + YQ cos p cos t + Z Q sin t + h / sin t
If point Q lies on the X-Y plane, ZQ is zero, and XQ
and YQ can be calculated from (xq,yq) as:
⎡h sin p (x sin s + y cos s ) sin t ⎤
q q ⎡− h cos p (x sin s + y cos s ) sin t ⎤ q
⎢ ⎥ ⎢
XQ = ⎣⎢+ h cos p (x cos s − y sin s ) ⎦⎥
q q ⎣⎢+ h sin p (x cos s − y sin s )
, YQ =
xq cos t sin s + yq cos t cos s + f sin t
Equations (1-4) define the transformation between
the world and image coordinates.
Given an image as depicted in Fig. 3(a), lane
markings that form a parallelogram [16] can be used
to estimate the camera parameters, from which
Equations (1-4) can be solved. In other words, every
pixel of the two consecutive images can be
transformed to the 3D coordinates (with Z=0) using
Equations (3) and (4), and the corresponding images
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f s
y x era
cam
.q
ne
la
(a) Original 1st image
ep
ag
im
Y
(b) Original 1st image (c)-(d) Reconstructed images of (a)&(b)
on X-Y plane respectively.
Figure 3. Transform 2-D image to X-Y plane in 3-D.
in X-Y plane can be reconstructed, as depicted in Fig.
3(c) and 3(d). Since both Fig. 3(c) and 3(d) represent
the view along the Z-axis perpendicular to the road
plane, the distance traversed by the vehicle from 3(c)
to 3(d) represents the actual distance traveled.
However, it should be 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 in [10] and [12],
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, our 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
color change, illumination change and shadow.
2.3. Vehicle Mask Overlay
If a background reference image is available, we
can easily extract the vehicle masks of each image and
estimate the vehicle position directly [18], [19]. On the
q premise that no background reference image is
⎥
⎦⎥q q
.
available, we regard one of the two images as a
xq cos t sin s + yq cos t cos s + f sin t
background reference, then perform conventional
vehicle mask extraction on the other image and finally
get an overlaid vehicle mask. In this paper, a simple
vehicle mask extraction method was adopted, which
includes three steps: temporal differencing,
thresholding and morphological operations.
First, we overlay one image onto the other by
taking an absolute difference between the two images.
This results in the image as depicted in Fig. 4(a). For
color images, we obtain the absolute difference in each

(a) (b) (c)
Figure 4. Overlaid vehicle mask from image
difference. (a) Absolute difference of Fig. 3(c)&(d);
(b) Binary image after thresholding; (c) Extracted
vehicle mask after morphological operations.
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 5. Exceptional case when individual vehicle
masks merged together (a) Reconstructed 1st
image; (b) Reconstructed 2nd image; (c) Binary
image after thresholding; (d) Extracted vehicle
mask after morphological operations.
color channel first and then average them to a gray
level image. The image depicted in Fig. 4(a) is then
thresholded to produce a binary image as depicted in
Fig. 4(b). The threshold, T, is a predefined value to
accommodate small pixel intensity variation. After
that, morphological opening is used to cleanup 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 Fig.
4(c).
In general, the case as depicted in Fig. 4 represents
a typical scenario. By computing the connected
components in the binary image, we have 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 in Section 2.4. However, for vehicles
that are traveling at low speed, or have long length, or
the two consecutive images are taken at a shorter time,
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it is possible that individual vehicle masks merged
with each other, creating an exceptional case as
depicted in Fig. 5. Speed still can be estimated from
this exceptional case, except that the search range for
block matching has to be enlarged. The following
sub-section discusses how this is performed and how
search range is enlarged because of that.
2.4. Block Matching and Speed Estimation
In this Section, the block matching algorithm
(BMA) discussed in [20] is modified for our purpose.
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, as depicted in Fig. 6.
The blob shown in Fig. 6 is part of the lower blob
from Fig. 4(c), 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
(d)
Figure 6. Definition of source block
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.
With these boundaries, we have 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 our proposed matching
algorithm. In the case of Fig. 4(c), we have a roughly
estimated displacement of the vehicle. Therefore,
search can be limited to a region S, search window,
which has a size of (2sx+2k)×(2sy+w) and centered at
estimated displacement. sx is usually set to a small
value aiming to reduce error due to the rough
estimation of the bottom lines, whereas sy is
determined by the degree of transverse vehicle
displacement to be tolerated. If lane change is allowed,
then sy would be set to the lane width. In the case of
 150
Speed from radar
120

Speed (km/h)
Estimated speed
90
60
30
0
1 5 10 15 20 25 30
(a) Test examples in daytime
150
120 Speed from radar

Speed (km/h)
Estimated speed
90
60
30
0
1 5 10 15 20 25 30
(b) Test examples in nighttime
Figure 7. Travel distance estimation Figure 8. Estimated speed compared with radar
measured speed
the two blobs are merged as in Fig. 5(d), it is not
possible to calculate the estimated displacement, where R is the resolution of reconstructed images, t is
therefore, we have to search the best matching block the time interval between the two images, and v is the
in a larger search window of [2sx+2k +(dmax-dmin)]× estimated speed.
(2sy+w), where dmax and dmin are maximum and
minimum displacement respectively which are derived 3. Experimental results and analysis
from prior knowledge such as theoretic maximum and
minimum speed of the vehicle. Consider that In this experiment, we evaluate the accuracy of the
illumination condition across images may vary (due to proposed method in estimating individual vehicle
flash, shadow of building, etc.), and that lane markings speed from real traffic images at day-time as well as
may affect the matching, we normalize the blocks by night-time, by comparing the estimated value with the
enhancing their contrast and saturating the high speed measured by a Doppler speed radar system. All
intensities part of them, as shown in Fig. 7, before the test images are taken by a surveillance camera at
calculating MAD. 0.5 seconds apart, with the size of 1280×1024 and 24
Once a block is matched, traveled distance in pixels, bit color depth mode. We first calculate the
PD, of the vehicle between the two images is reconstructed images as described in Section 2.2 with
represented by the distance between the source block resolution of 10 pixels/meter, and then threshold the
and the matched block. Vehicle speed is the distance 256 gray level frame difference using a threshold of 30
traveled normalized to physical distance in meters, and to generate the vehicle mask. k, sx and sy in block
divided by the time taken to traverse that distance, matching period were set to 10 pixels, 20 pixels and
which is given by: 10 pixels respectively.
PD / R , For the 31 sets of day-time images, the results
v=
t estimated by the proposed method and reference speed

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 9. Typical test examples. (a) high speed daytime case, (b) low speed daytime case, (c) nighttime

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 from radar are plotted in Fig. 8(a). Reference speeds
extend from 41 to 121 km/h. It can be seen that the
estimation error in each case ranges from 0 to 6.72
km/h. The average error rate is 3.27%, with higher
estimation error rate occurring at low speed. Typical
example for daytime cases is depicted in Fig. 7, where
Fig. 9(a) depicts a high speed case and Fig. 9(b)
depicts a low speed case. In general, the location of
the baseline appears to be accurate and the matching
of source block is correct.
For the 33 sets of night-time images, the results are
plotted in Fig. 8(b). Again, reference speed ranges
from 41 – 122, and it can be seen that the estimation
error is larger than the day-time cases, with absolute
error of each case varies from 0.36 to 14.44 km/h,
giving an average error of 8.51% compared with speed
from radar. It should be noted that for night-time
images the bumper shadows are difficult to be
extracted correctly in most cases since their color or
intensity is very similar to the road. This is illustrated
by a typical example for night-time case in Fig. 9(c).
In this example, the source block is found to be one
corner of the bumper, and the matching is correctly
performed on the 2nd image. However, as the bumper
is above ground, this introduces error due to height to
the estimation as a result. As such, the deterioration of
estimation performance for night-time cases is not
entirely unexpected. Comparing our results with other
vision-based speed estimation methods [8-12], it is
found that the proposed method achieves rather good
daytime estimation when others have over 10% of
error. As none others have attempted nighttime cases,
no reasonable comparison can be made here.
4. 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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