Real-time validation of vision-based over-height vehicle detection system

Abstract

Over-height vehicle strikes with low bridges and tunnels are an ongoing problem worldwide. While previous methods have used vision-based systems to address the over-height warning problem, such methods are sensitive to wind. In this paper, we perform a full validation of the system using a constraint-based approach to minimize the number of over-height vehicle misclassifications due to windy conditions. The dataset includes a total of 102 over-height vehicles recorded at frame rates of 25 and 30fps. An analysis is performed of wind and vehicle displacements to track over-height features using optical flow paired with SURF feature detectors. Motion captured within the region of interest was treated as a standard two-class binary linear classification problem with 1 indicating over-height vehicle presence and 0 indicating noise. The algorithm performed with 100% recall, 83.3% precision, false positive rate of 0.2% and warning accuracy of 96.6%.