Road Condition Detection and Classification from Existing CCTV Feed

Abstract

The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) has approximately 500 digital cameras along highways in populated areas of Indiana. These cameras are used to monitor traffic conditions around the clock, all year round. Currently, the videos from these cameras are observed one-by-one by human operators looking for traffic conditions and incidents. The main objective of this research was to develop an automatic, real-time system to monitor traffic conditions and detect incidents automatically.

The Transportation and Autonomous Systems Institute (TASI) of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and the Traffic Management Center of INDOT developed a system that monitors the traffic conditions based on the INDOT CCTV video feeds. The proposed system performs traffic flow estimation, incident detection, and classification of vehicles involved in an incident.

The research team designed the system, including the hardware and software components added to the existing INDOT CCTV system; the relationship between the added system and the currently existing INDOT system; the database structure for traffic data extracted from the videos; and a user-friendly, web-based server for showing the incident locations automatically. The specific work in this project includes vehicle-detection, road boundary detection, lane detection, vehicle count over time, flow-rate detection, traffic condition detection, database development, web-based graphical user interface (GUI), and a hardware specification study. The preliminary prototype of some system components has been implemented in the Development of Automated Incident Detection System Using Existing ATMS CCT (SPR-4305).