Real-time vehicle detection with foreground-based cascade classifier

The strategy based on Haar-like features and the cascade classifier for vehicle detection systems has captured growing attention for its effectiveness and robustness; however, such a vehicle detection strategy relies on exhaustive scanning of an entire image with different sizes sliding windows, which is tedious and inefficient, since a vehicle only occupies a small part of the whole scene. Therefore, the authors propose a real-time vehicle detection algorithm which is based on the improved Haar-like features and combines motion detection with a cascade of classifiers. They adopt a visual background extractor, accompanied by morphological processing, to obtain foregrounds. These foregrounds retain vehicle features and provide the positions within images where vehicles are most likely to be located. Subsequently, vehicle detection is performed only at these positions by using a cascade of classifiers instead of a single strong classifier, which is able to improve the detection performance. The authors’ algorithm has been successfully evaluated on the public datasets, which demonstrates its robustness and real-time performance.