A novel method to handle the partial occlusion and shadow detection of highway vehicles

Abstract

This study proposes a novel method for resolving the partial occlusion and shadow of moving vehicles seen in a sequence of highway traffic images captured from a single roadside fixed camera position. The proposed method detects the shadow regions of foreground/moving vehicles in any direction with no human intervention. Also, it handles the partially occluded vehicles in three different states on the highway traffic scene. The moving vehicles are detected using the background subtraction method followed by using the dilation and erosion operations. In this step, every segmented moving vehicle has an extracted Feature Vector (FV) which is used to initialize the Shadow Searching Window (SSW). Then, a chromatic based analysis technique uses the semi mean value of RGB colour space of moving vehicle region pixels as a threshold value to discriminate the shadow of moving vehicles despite the direction of movement. Finally, the partially occluded vehicles are handled using a new training procedure based on previous estimations to calculate the new moving vehicle sizes. These sizes are employed to separate and highlight the partially occluded vehicles by drawing the bounding boxes for each moving vehicle.