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short user manual for the software. Finally in chapter 6 the two implemented approaches
are evaluated and compared. The goal of this research is to give an answer to the
question which approach, a deterministic or statistical approach, performs better
background subtraction results in the given setting.
2. System Requirements and setting
2.1. The Setting
In this section the environmental setting of this research will be discussed and, given this
setting, the requirements of a traffic monitor system will be given. Getting a complete
overview of requirements and possible difficulties that might occur is an important first
step in the design of such a complex system. The first assumption is that the focus is on
the monitoring of urban traffic and monitoring the flow of traffic through a city. Typical
places to mount camera’s will logically be at important intersections and crossroads. By
identifying vehicles and keep track of their direction in each stream, an overview of the
flow of the traffic can be realized in a cheap and efficient way. Now an overview of
characteristics, that will be present in general video streams from an urban intersection
scene, is given:
o The roads leading to the intersections can have multiple lanes.
o Vehicles and pedestrians enter and leave the scene. This does not necessarily
happen at the border of the image frame, for example a pedestrian can enter the
scene by coming out of a building standing nearby the intersection.
o Queues of vehicles will often appear since traffic signs may be present. As a result
vehicles will drive at very different speeds
o Cast-shadows and self-shadows of the vehicles and other objects might appear in
the scene. Furthermore the shadows can disappear and reappear in a short period
of time if the weather is cloudy.
o Also as a result of cloudy weather, sudden global illumination changes might occur
often. A sudden illumination change also occurs at the moment when the street
lights are turned off and on.
o Weather conditions like snow, fog or rainfall causes more noise in the video
stream and makes the movement of the objects less detailed.
o Since we have an urban setting, not only cars and trucks will drive on the roads
but also more versatile vehicles like bikes and scoot mobiles could be present.
Also animals and pedestrians might cross the roads.
o Not only vehicles and pedestrians move in the scene but also environmental
movements (depending on wind speed) like branches of nearby trees, flags,
debris on the road, moving commercial billboards, etc.
o Vehicles can become part of the background when for example a car is parked in
the scene.
o In general, urban intersections are very well lit, So detecting objects at night
times should not be a more difficult operation then detecting objects at daytimes.
2.2. The tasks and requirements of a robust urban traffic monitor system
Given the setting in the previous section, the requirements of an urban traffic monitor
system can be determined. First of all, the system should have an adaptive background
model since we have to cope with (sudden) changes of illumination in the scene and
objects can become part of the background. Secondly, since queuing of vehicles does
occur often, the detection algorithm should successfully detect all separate vehicles, even
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