Compensating Background for Noise due to Camera Vibration in Uncalibrated-Camera-Based Vehicle Speed Measurement System

Vision-based vehicle speed measurement (VSM) is one of the most convenient methods available in intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods use an uncalibrated camera to measure vehicle speed, but they do not consider the possibility of camera vibration that leads to poor measurement results. This paper considers the issue when the camera is tilted downward and mounted at a fixed location on a bridge crossing the target street. The camera may vibrate due to wind or bridge movement. A vision-based speed measurement system is described in this paper, along with the vertical-and-horizontal-histogram-based method, which is used to compensate the background of an incoming image. This novel method is utilized to eliminate noise coming from the displacement between an incoming image and a background image that is caused by camera vibration over time. Moreover, a method is presented to automatically detect the vanishing point based on the Hough transform and quadtree. Experimental comparisons of the system to those of the vehicle's own speedometer show that the proposed approach yields a satisfactory estimate of vehicle speed.