On-road visual vehicle tracking using Markov chain Monte Carlo with metropolis sampling

In this study, a method for vehicle tracking through video analysis based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) particle filtering with metropolis sampling is proposed. The method handles multiple targets with low computational requirements and is, therefore, ideally suited for advanced-driver assistance systems that involve real-time operation. The method exploits the removed perspective domain given by inverse perspective mapping (IPM) to define a fast and efficient likelihood model. Additionally, the method encompasses an interaction model using Markov Random Fields (MRF) that allows treatment of dependencies between the motions of targets. The proposed method is tested in highway sequences and compared to state-of-the-art methods for vehicle tracking, i.e., independent target tracking with Kalman filtering (KF) and joint tracking with particle filtering. The results showed fewer tracking failures using the proposed method

Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicle in Off-Road Scenario

The road topography information, such as bank angle and road slope, can significantly affect the trajectory tracking performance of the autonomous vehicle, so this information needs to be considered in the trajectory planning and tracking control for off-road autonomous vehicle. In this chapter, a two-level real-time dynamically integrated spatiotemporal-based trajectory planning and control method for off-road autonomous vehicle is proposed. In the upper-level trajectory planner, the most suitable time-parameterised trajectory with the minimum values of road slope and bank angle can be selected from a set of candidate trajectories. In the lower-level trajectory tracking controller, the sliding-mode control (SMC) technique is applied to control the vehicle and achieve the desired trajectory. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the proposed integrated trajectory planning and control method and prove that the proposed integrated method has better overall tracking control and dynamics control performance than the conventional method both in the highway scenario and off-road scenario. Furthermore, the four-wheel-independent-steering (4WIS) and four-wheel-independent-driving (4WID) vehicle shows better tracking control performance than vehicle based on two-wheel model

Real Time Lidar and Radar High-Level Fusion for Obstacle Detection and Tracking with evaluation on a ground truth

20th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications Lisbon sept 24-25, 2018— Both Lidars and Radars are sensors for obstacle detection. While Lidars are very accurate on obstacles positions and less accurate on their velocities, Radars are more precise on obstacles velocities and less precise on their positions. Sensor fusion between Lidar and Radar aims at improving obstacle detection using advantages of the two sensors. The present paper proposes a real-time Lidar/Radar data fusion algorithm for obstacle detection and tracking based on the global nearest neighbour standard filter (GNN). This algorithm is implemented and embedded in an automative vehicle as a component generated by a real-time multisensor software. The benefits of data fusion comparing with the use of a single sensor are illustrated through several tracking scenarios (on a highway and on a bend) and using real-time kinematic sensors mounted on the ego and tracked vehicles as a ground truth

Automatic vehicle detection and tracking in aerial video

This thesis is concerned with the challenging tasks of automatic and real-time vehicle detection and tracking from aerial video. The aim of this thesis is to build an automatic system that can accurately localise any vehicles that appear in aerial video frames and track the target vehicles with trackers. Vehicle detection and tracking have many applications and this has been an active area of research during recent years; however, it is still a challenge to deal with certain realistic environments. This thesis develops vehicle detection and tracking algorithms which enhance the robustness of detection and tracking beyond the existing approaches. The basis of the vehicle detection system proposed in this thesis has different object categorisation approaches, with colour and texture features in both point and area template forms. The thesis also proposes a novel Self-Learning Tracking and Detection approach, which is an extension to the existing Tracking Learning Detection (TLD) algorithm. There are a number of challenges in vehicle detection and tracking. The most difficult challenge of detection is distinguishing and clustering the target vehicle from the background objects and noises. Under certain conditions, the images captured from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are also blurred; for example, turbulence may make the vehicle shake during flight. This thesis tackles these challenges by applying integrated multiple feature descriptors for real-time processing. In this thesis, three vehicle detection approaches are proposed: the HSV-GLCM feature approach, the ISM-SIFT feature approach and the FAST-HoG approach. The general vehicle detection approaches used have highly flexible implicit shape representations. They are based on training samples in both positive and negative sets and use updated classifiers to distinguish the targets. It has been found that the detection results attained by using HSV-GLCM texture features can be affected by blurring problems; the proposed detection algorithms can further segment the edges of the vehicles from the background. Using the point descriptor feature can solve the blurring problem, however, the large amount of information contained in point descriptors can lead to processing times that are too long for real-time applications. So the FAST-HoG approach combining the point feature and the shape feature is proposed. This new approach is able to speed up the process that attains the real-time performance. Finally, a detection approach using HoG with the FAST feature is also proposed. The HoG approach is widely used in object recognition, as it has a strong ability to represent the shape vector of the object. However, the original HoG feature is sensitive to the orientation of the target; this method improves the algorithm by inserting the direction vectors of the targets. For the tracking process, a novel tracking approach was proposed, an extension of the TLD algorithm, in order to track multiple targets. The extended approach upgrades the original system, which can only track a single target, which must be selected before the detection and tracking process. The greatest challenge to vehicle tracking is long-term tracking. The target object can change its appearance during the process and illumination and scale changes can also occur. The original TLD feature assumed that tracking can make errors during the tracking process, and the accumulation of these errors could cause tracking failure, so the original TLD proposed using a learning approach in between the tracking and the detection by adding a pair of inspectors (positive and negative) to constantly estimate errors. This thesis extends the TLD approach with a new detection method in order to achieve multiple-target tracking. A Forward and Backward Tracking approach has been proposed to eliminate tracking errors and other problems such as occlusion. The main purpose of the proposed tracking system is to learn the features of the targets during tracking and re-train the detection classifier for further processes. This thesis puts particular emphasis on vehicle detection and tracking in different extreme scenarios such as crowed highway vehicle detection, blurred images and changes in the appearance of the targets. Compared with currently existing detection and tracking approaches, the proposed approaches demonstrate a robust increase in accuracy in each scenario

Drivers in Expressway Superlong Tunnels: The Change Patterns of Visual Features and the Discriminant Model of Driving Safety

A real-vehicle experiment was carried out in the superlong highway tunnel environment to study the change patterns of driver’s visual features, tracked by eye tracking devices, and the discriminant model of driver’s safety status. On the basis of statistical analysis, a single index and a comprehensive index discriminant model, both based on a C4.5 decision tree, were established. The results showed that compared with the non-tunnel highway sections, the driver’s pupil size was larger, and the gaze duration was longer in the tunnel section. Driver’s pupil size was larger in mid-tunnel section than in the entrance section and exit section. Gazes at the exit section were mainly short gazes. Compared to the exit section, driver’s pupil size changed more dramatically in the entrance section, and the gaze duration was longer. The single visual parameter indicator could clearly discriminate the driver’s safety status in the mid-tunnel section and the non-tunnel sections, while the dual-index-based identification model could clearly discriminate the safety status in each highway sections. The study deepens the research on the driver information perception model in superlong highway tunnels. Also, the study provides a theoretical basis for establishing a visual-feature-based real-time safety status discriminant

SINet: A Scale-insensitive Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Vehicle Detection

Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet) for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance of scales and extremely small objects.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS