A Survey of Vision-Based Traffic Monitoring of Road Intersections

Visual surveillance of dynamic objects, particularly vehicles on the road, has been, over the past decade, an active research topic in computer vision and intelligent transportation systems communities. In the context of traffic monitoring, important advances have been achieved in environment modeling, vehicle detection, tracking, and behavior analysis. This paper is a survey that addresses particularly the issues related to vehicle monitoring with cameras at road intersections. In fact, the latter has variable architectures and represents a critical area in traffic. Accidents at intersections are extremely dangerous, and most of them are caused by drivers' errors. Several projects have been carried out to enhance the safety of drivers in the special context of intersections. In this paper, we provide an overview of vehicle perception systems at road intersections and representative related data sets. The reader is then given an introductory overview of general vision-based vehicle monitoring approaches. Subsequently and above all, we present a review of studies related to vehicle detection and tracking in intersection-like scenarios. Regarding intersection monitoring, we distinguish and compare roadside (pole-mounted, stationary) and in-vehicle (mobile platforms) systems. Then, we focus on camera-based roadside monitoring systems, with special attention to omnidirectional setups. Finally, we present possible research directions that are likely to improve the performance of vehicle detection and tracking at intersections.