A Gaussian mixture model and support vector machine approach to vehicle type and colour classification

The authors describe their approach to segmenting moving road vehicles from the colour video data supplied by a stationary roadside closed‐circuit television (CCTV) camera and classifying those vehicles in terms of type (car, van and heavy goods vehicle) and dominant colour. For the segmentation, the authors use a recursively updated Gaussian mixture model approach, with a multi‐dimensional smoothing transform. The authors show that this transform improves the segmentation performance, particularly in adverse imaging conditions, such as when there is camera vibration. The authors then present a comprehensive comparative evaluation of shadow detection approaches, which is an essential component of background subtraction in outdoor scenes. For vehicle classification, a practical and systematic approach using a kernelised support vector machine is developed. The good recognition rates achieved in the authors’ experiments indicate that their approach is well suited for pragmatic vehicle classification applications.