Automated speed detection of moving vehicles from remote sensing images

A new method is developed to detect the speed of moving vehicles from two consecutive digital aerial images and a pair of QuickBird (QB) panchromatic and multi-spectral images. Since two consecutive digital aerial images taken by UCD have an 80% overlap, the speed of moving vehicles in the overlap can be detected by the movement between the two images and the time lag (about 3 sec). Firstly, vehicles are extracted by an object-based method from each image. Then the vehicle matching is carried out to find the same vehicles from the two consecutive images and calculate their speeds. QB images also can be used to detect the speed of moving vehicles, using the time lag (about 0.2 sec) between the panchromatic and multi-spectral images. Since the resolution of QB’s multi-spectral images is about 2.4 m/pixel, the area correlation method is introduced to detect the exact location of vehicle. The results can be extensively used to access road traffic. Safety, Reliability and Risk of Structures, Infrastructures and Engineering Systems – Furuta, Frangopol & Shinozuka (eds) © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-415-47557-0