text: Traffic congestion is a widespread problem. Dynamic traffic routing systems and congestion pricing are getting importance in recent research. Lane prediction and vehicle density estimation is an important component of such systems. We introduce a novel problem of vehicle self-positioning which involves predicting the number of lanes on the road and vehicle's position in those lanes using videos captured by a dashboard camera. We propose an integrated closed-loop approach where we use the presence of vehicles to aid the task of self-positioning and vice-versa. To incorporate multiple factors and high-level semantic knowledge into the solution, we formulate this problem as a Bayesian framework. In the framework, the number of lanes, the vehicle's position in those lanes and the presence of other vehicles are considered as parameters. We also propose a bounding box selection scheme to reduce the number of false detections and increase the computational efficiency. We show that the number of box proposals decreases by a factor of 6 using the selection approach. It also results in large reduction in the number of false detections. The entire approach is tested on real-world videos and is found to give acceptable results.
  @cite_18: This paper introduces a general active-learning framework for robust on-road vehicle recognition and tracking. This framework takes a novel active-learning approach to building vehicle-recognition and tracking systems. A passively trained recognition system is built using conventional supervised learning. Using the query and archiving interface for active learning (QUAIL), the passively trained vehicle-recognition system is evaluated on an independent real-world data set, and informative samples are queried and archived to perform selective sampling. A second round of learning is then performed to build an active-learning-based vehicle recognizer. Particle filter tracking is integrated to build a complete multiple-vehicle tracking system. The active-learning-based vehicle-recognition and tracking (ALVeRT) system has been thoroughly evaluated on static images and roadway video data captured in a variety of traffic, illumination, and weather conditions. Experimental results show that this framework yields a robust efficient on-board vehicle recognition and tracking system with high precision, high recall, and good localization.
  @cite_14: This paper aims at real-time in-car video analysis to detect and track vehicles ahead for safety, autodriving, and target tracing. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to localizing target vehicles in video under various environmental conditions. The extracted geometry features from the video are continuously projected onto a 1-D profile and are constantly tracked. We rely on temporal information of features and their motion behaviors for vehicle identification, which compensates for the complexity in recognizing vehicle shapes, colors, and types. We probabilistically model the motion in the field of view according to the scene characteristic and the vehicle motion model. The hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to separate target vehicles from the background and track them probabilistically. We have investigated videos of day and night on different types of roads, showing that our approach is robust and effective in dealing with changes in environment and illumination and that real-time processing becomes possible for vehicle-borne cameras.
  @cite_21: We describe an object detection system based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. Our system is able to represent highly variable object classes and achieves state-of-the-art results in the PASCAL object detection challenges. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL data sets. Our system relies on new methods for discriminative training with partially labeled data. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data-mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM is a reformulation of MI--SVM in terms of latent variables. A latent SVM is semiconvex, and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. This leads to an iterative training algorithm that alternates between fixing latent values for positive examples and optimizing the latent SVM objective function.
  @cite_15: Object detection is challenging when the object class exhibits large within-class variations. In this work, we show that foreground-background classification (detection) and within-class classification of the foreground class (pose estimation) can be jointly learned in a multiplicative form of two kernel functions. Model training is accomplished via standard SVM learning. When the foreground object masks are provided in training, the detectors can also produce object segmentations. A tracking-by-detection framework to recover foreground state in video sequences is also proposed with our model. The advantages of our method are demonstrated on tasks of object detection, view angle estimation, and tracking. Our approach compares favorably to existing methods on hand and vehicle detection tasks. Quantitative tracking results are given on sequences of moving vehicles and human faces.
  @cite_13: This paper provides a review of the literature in on-road vision-based vehicle detection, tracking, and behavior understanding. Over the past decade, vision-based surround perception has progressed from its infancy into maturity. We provide a survey of recent works in the literature, placing vision-based vehicle detection in the context of sensor-based on-road surround analysis. We detail advances in vehicle detection, discussing monocular, stereo vision, and active sensor-vision fusion for on-road vehicle detection. We discuss vision-based vehicle tracking in the monocular and stereo-vision domains, analyzing filtering, estimation, and dynamical models. We discuss the nascent branch of intelligent vehicles research concerned with utilizing spatiotemporal measurements, trajectories, and various features to characterize on-road behavior. We provide a discussion on the state of the art, detail common performance metrics and benchmarks, and provide perspective on future research directions in the field.
summary: Vehicle detection is a subset of a widely-studied problem of object detection. There are a plethora of approaches for general object detection, @cite_21 , or approaches dedicated to vehicle detection which use optical-flow and hidden-markov-model based classification to interpret motion-based clues @cite_14 . HOG and HAAR features have also been used with different classifiers and learning frameworks such as adaboost, SVM and active learning @cite_18 @cite_15 . Though there are innumerable methods developed for general object detection and specifically for vehicle detection, listing them all is beyond the scope of this paper. A good review of vehicle detection methods can be found in @cite_13 . In spite of continuous efforts, there are no reliable vision-based solutions to predicting number of lanes and vehicle self-positioning given a front-facing view.