Vehicle-component identification based on multiscale textural couriers

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for identifying vehicle components in a monocular traffic image sequence. In the proposed method, the vehicles are first divided into multiscale regions based on the center of gravity of the foreground vehicle mask and the calibrated-camera parameters. With these multiscale regions, textural couriers are generated based on the localized variances of the foreground vehicle image. A new scale-space model is subsequently created based on the textural couriers to provide a topological structure of the vehicle. In this model, key feature points of the vehicle can significantly be described based on the topological structure to determine the regions that are homogenous in texture from which vehicle components can be identified by segmenting the key feature points. Since no motion information is required in order to segment the vehicles prior to recognition, the proposed system can be used in situations where extensive observation time is not available or motion information is unreliable. This novel method can be used in real-world systems such as vehicle-shape reconstruction, vehicle classification, and vehicle recognition. This method was demonstrated and tested on 200 different vehicle samples captured in routine outdoor traffic images and achieved an average error rate of 6.8% with a variety of vehicles and traffic scenes. © 2006 IEEE.