Application of Plane Homography for Vehicle Speed Calculations in Traffic Accident Investigations

The analysis of vehicle speeds at the moment of traffic accidents is becoming increasingly important. To solve difficult calculations arising from video analysis when the shooting direction of the camera is the same as the driving direction of the vehicles, an improved plane homography method is proposed. This method is based on detecting the frame rate of and extracting all of the key image frames from a surveillance video. Next, a normalizing approach for the control points is proposed to reduce the ill-conditions of matrix calculations when the perspective image is rectified to an orthographic image. The information in the rectified image is then measured and recorded by extracting the mark point information. Finally, the corresponding curve of time and speed for the examined vehicle is created, which can be used to analyze the average braking deceleration of the accident-causing vehicle. This method can directly determine the speed of a vehicle using videos of a traffic accident without any reference to the dimensions of the vehicle itself. Considering an actual traffic accident as an example, the driving trajectories and velocity curves for two vehicles are obtained using this method. The proposed method can effectively overcome the shortcomings of the commonly used speed recognition methods and it is easy to utilize.