Velocity calculation by automatic camera calibration based on homogenous fog weather condition

A novel algorithm for vehicle average velocity detection through automatic and dynamic camera calibration based on dark channel in homogenous fog weather condition is presented in this paper. Camera fixed in the middle of the road should be calibrated in homogenous fog weather condition, and can be used in any weather condition. Unlike other researches in velocity calculation area, our traffic model only includes road plane and vehicles in motion. Painted lines in scene image are neglected because sometimes there are no traffic lanes, especially in un-structured traffic scene. Once calibrated, scene distance will be got and can be used to calculate vehicles average velocity. Three major steps are included in our algorithm. Firstly, current video frame is recognized to discriminate current weather condition based on area search method (ASM). If it is homogenous fog, average pixel value from top to bottom in the selected area will change in the form of edge spread function (ESF). Secondly, traffic road surface plane will be found by generating activity map created by calculating the expected value of the absolute intensity difference between two adjacent frames. Finally, scene transmission image is got by dark channel prior theory, camera’s intrinsic and extrinsic parameters are calculated based on the parameter calibration formula deduced from monocular model and scene transmission image. In this step, several key points with particular transmission value for generating necessary calculation equations on road surface are selected to calibrate the camera. Vehicles’ pixel coordinates are transformed to camera coordinates. Distance between vehicles and the camera will be calculated, and then average velocity for each vehicle is got. At the end of this paper, calibration results and vehicles velocity data for nine vehicles in different weather conditions are given. Comparison with other algorithms verifies the effectiveness of our algorithm.